This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to significantly increase your website traffic to over 50,000 hits monthly without purchasing banner space on the internet. It focuses on the power of search engine submissions and the importance of optimizing your website's HTML code and content for search engines.
Many companies claim that submitting your site to numerous search engines will increase your website traffic. While this might be true to some extent, it's not as straightforward as it seems. You can submit your website to thousands of search engines daily for a year and still not achieve a good ranking. This is because there's a lot of groundwork to be done before submitting your site.
The process can be broken down into three steps:
When you submit your website to a search engine like Excite, it sends a robot or spider (a search program) to your website to gather information about it. The robot also follows every link on your site and collects data from those pages. This data is then reported back to the search engine where it gets indexed or filed according to its content. The indexed websites appear in a specific order based on the keyword(s) searched.
In all three steps, the most crucial factor to consider is keywords. Keywords can be words or phrases that people will search for to find a site on your topic. For instance, if you run a pet store, some keywords could be "pet", "pet store", "pet shop", "pet supplies", "pets", or specific products or brands like "IAMS", "Science Diet", and "catnip".
The HTML of your index page, particularly the HEAD section, is crucial to optimize before submitting your site to a search engine. This section should include the title and meta tags, which should contain your keywords.
All images on your site should be named and have ALT tags. This is often overlooked by many web designers. Including keyword-rich Image Names and Alt tags throughout your index page provides the spiders and robots with plenty of content for indexing.
The content of your site, including all the words and images, is vital. Keyword-rich text will help you the most. The words on your page should include your keywords and phrases.
Invest in a software program like Web Position Gold that can track your Search Engine Rankings. It's reasonably priced and will help you keep track of your progress.
You don't need to submit your site to thousands of search engines. Focus on the top ones like Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, and Web Crawler. Just between Yahoo and Excite, you'll cover over 60% of all online searches.
Don't get impatient. It will initially take you at least six weeks to get your website listed with the major search engines. If after two months, you aren't showing up where you want to be, do some research. Check which sites are ranking best for your keywords, look at their HEAD section, their image tags, and their content. Borrow their ideas and resubmit to the search engine you need to. Then, wait approximately six weeks for an update.
With diligence, your site will soon have thousands of visitors per day and per week, instead of the few stragglers that are finding it today. Best of all, it costs you nothing but a little time and effort.
