You have your site into the search engines, but where are all the visitors? As a webmaster or site owner, you have probably received the email ads or seen advertisements of guaranteed search engine rankings and more visitors and so on. It sounds really good, until you see the price tag, and the rest of this article. Are there other forms of advertising and better ways to get traffic? Good search engines can do a variety of things for a variety of people. They provide ease when the user is trying to find something online. Without search engines, the internet would not be the same. It would be much more complicated. Now, with all the hype about search engines and the visitors they can bring, Is it possible? First off, any program offering a guaranteed ranking is a scam. Googles search results are based upon PageRank and relevancy. It is an automated process. Google does not have the thousands of people needed to manually set a sites ranking for each individual keyword. Lets examine the term ranking. You site will have a many rankings. It will have a different ranking for every keyword in the site. For instance, if a user searches dog tricks, your site may come up at number seventeen. If you also offer webmaster tools and a user searches adopting a puppy, your site could show up as the four-hundredth site in Googles list. How can an optimization company guarantee a certain ranking? They can not! They can guarantee a ranking (every site has a ranking), what that ranking is, no one can tell. Sure, rankings do affect how many visitors you will get through search engines, but the safest way to get those visitors is to offer something unique, have a variety of good content, and use search engine friendly URLs. Do not be fooled by those scams and fake promises. That leads us to the solution, how you can get visitors through search engines. To get results with search engines, there are three things you must have. The first is good content. If a website is filled with a bunch of banner ads and links, it will not have a good ranking. A website needs meat. It needs content and a focus. Your website can cover a general topic like Computers and Internet (I wouldnt recommend it) but do not try to cover everything on the planet like About.com. Second, your site needs incoming links. These links are not ones you exchange with other companies. Exchanging links can even be harmful. Engines spiders can now detect those and they have next to no relevancy. If a visitor likes you site, they could add a link to you on their site or tell their friend. Another way to gain links is submitting content, which is explained later in the article. Third, make clear what your website is about. Use your keywords (words that tell a user what your site is about) throughout your page. Although some search engines are moving away from Meta tags, you will still want to use them. Choose a descriptive title and write a good description. The keywords arent so important provided you use them in the content of your site. If your site can not seem to get a high search engine ranking and you want visitors then you have two options. First, a site owner can choose to pay for visitors through something such as a Pay-Per-Click program, like Googles AdWords. This is the safest way to go because it is guaranteed visitors through a trusted company, but it will cost you. It will cost a couple cents a click which will add up in the long run. If you choose this type of campaign, make sure you have signed up with a quality and respected company which has many places to publish your ad, like Google or Yahoo. Pay-per-click campaigns are great if you have money, but if money is an issue settle for another form of advertising. Despite popular speculation and what advertising companies want you to think, you do not have to pay to get visitors. However, not paying could take longer to gain visitors. I would call it free advertising for a particular service. Visitors can come through submissions to other sites. If you have a particular talent, like building websites or writing, you can get visitors. Lets use a talent for website designing as an example. You can build website templates (a webpage that has a preset design, which a site owner just adds content too) and submit them to free template sites. These sites will display your product but along with it they will display your link. Many free template sites accept submissions and I have seen traffic jump dramatically in as little as two days. If you can write articles, you can submit them to E-zine (online magazines) directories where E-zine publishers look for articles to publish. There are hundreds of categories to write about and there is more than likely a category for everyone. The E-zine will publish the author info and your sites URL which in itself is a free advertisement. Follow these guidelines, and you are on your way to gaining high-quality visitors to the site you own. |
