Home >> Traffic Tips

How to Create a Website - Traffic Tips

Visitor traffic is essential to keep any website alive. Most of your first-time visitors you will receive will be from free search engine traffic (i.e. from people searching certain terms on Google). There are other ways of receiving traffic like creating a custom screensaver or contributing to other people's newsletters, but free search engine traffic is by far the most productive method. Many other ways of attracting visitors lead back to connecting with search engine traffic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is technical term meaning to "optimize" your website to obtain good rankings in the search engines. This is a very broad topic, but I think it is worth discussing. I will list tips to help you get your website into the search engines and improve your ranking.

How to check if your site is in the search engines

To check if the search engines has been indexed (crawled by the search engine's spider) by the search engines, you simply need to search "site:website.com", replacing website.com with the actual URL, but without the "www". This works with Google, Yahoo! and MSN, the three largest search engines. This will also show you how many pages of your website have been indexed if these search engines have seen it.

Giving your website a makeover if your site is not listed in the search engines or the directories

Not being accepted into the directories is quite natural, especially if your pages have no focus on a specific topic. However, it is often rather simple to get yourself into the search engines. The tips I'm going to recommend may help you with getting into the directories too. Click here to read about how to fix and clean your website.

How to get your website into the search engines

So your site hasn't gotten into the search engines? Here is how to get in. Please note that it is recommended you give your website a makeover if it is not ready to be submitted (see the step above).

First of all, submit your URL to the search engines. Here are the places you can go to.

Google	http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo!	http://submit.search.yahoo.com/
MSN	http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

The Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) search engine currently does not accept URL submissions. It relies on its "website crawler". You may be wondering why I haven't listed other search engines like AOL or DogPile. I explain this on my search engine statistics page. But if you want to continue without reading that article, just take my word for it that you do not need to submit your website to these other search engines.

Then, you should send the search engines a sitemap. This basically lists to the search engine all your pages in a document. The search engines use your sitemap to increase coverage of your webpages and to learn more about the structure of your website. Don't worry, you don't have to write out all your webpages by hand. These documents are very simple to create. I discuss this on my sitemaps page.

Another way to become listed on the search engines is to get websites already listed on the search engine to link to you. Preferably, these websites are relevant to your website. The way this works is that, for example, Google's crawler revisits the site that links to you. It finds the link to your website, ending up on your site, and then it indexes at least your front page and you can find your page in Google.

If your website has been knocked back by Google, it is usually because there is something seriously wrong with your website. Read my article above about giving your website a makeover and follow Google's instructions on how to request the reconsideration of your website.

Submitting to important directories

Online directories are normally human-edited and can allow you to acquire a massive amount of visitors. If they feel your site would be a worthy addition to their directory, your website will be added into a specific subcategory (and there are thousands!). In order to get into a directory, you should have fairly good content and the whole website should be themed e.g. chess, because otherwise your website won't be able to be put in a subcategory. Webmasters with multiple website subjects could consider creating a subdomain (e.g. http://subject.geniusprophecy.com/) and then submitting them to the search engines and the directories as separate websites. The website About.com does this, they have multiples subdomains including chess and swimming. There are two main online directories, the Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project.

The Yahoo! Directory is owned by Yahoo!, the search engine. This is a very large directory with thousands of subcategories. Submission by commercial sites may cost a lot, but non-commercial sites submit free. Click here to submit to the Yahoo! Directory.

The Open Directory Project is owned by Netscape. It is the most comprehensive and largest human-edited directory on the web. Click here to suggest a URL to the Open Directory Project. The document will guide you through the process.

How to make your website rank high in the search engines

The best and most efficient way to rank high in the search engines is to have high-quality relevant links pointing to your website. People will do this automatically without your knowledge, but you can also be encouraged to join a quality link program. This will allow for relevant sites to link to each other. Google's ranking system is based on how many websites point to you.

You can check out the free ebook below for some additional helpful tips, although I have already gone through some of them.

The Traffic Tips Ebook

Want traffic? Learn how to build a healthy stream of traffic to your webpage. Most of the important methods listed in this ebook are completely FREE.

Click here to download this free ebook.

How to bypass all the do-it-yourself optimization

I have worked with the web host Site Build It. This web host especially configures your pages for search engine traffic. They will ping Google and Yahoo, sending them a sitemap straight away. They will also analyze your content for where you can improve. Site Build It is a great option for beginners. Site Build It allows you to worry only about your content and not all the technicalities involved with attracting search engine traffic.

Posted by Proabffmm on Sunday, February 4, 2008.