There is no way your website can be a success if it is ignored by the search engines. Unlike paid advertising which only

attracts visitors for as long as you are able to carry on paying for the ads; search engines will bring traffic for months and years on end and at no cost to you.

The majority of Internet users find websites by typing in a keyword or phrase into search engines such as Google and then following the links displayed by the search engine. It has been established that when am Internet user is looking to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:

The first option is they find their site through a search engine.

Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.

Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Search engines then produce the vast majority of traffic for a website, but not all search engines are created equal. The big three are Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN). All three are very powerful and if your website is ranked highly by any of them then you will have no difficulty in attracting visitors to your site.

But, and it’s a big but, Yahoo and Live combined will not produce half of the traffic that Google will on its own. The priority then should be to ensure your website is listed by Google. There are three main ways to achieve this. 

 

Use submission programmes such as Traffic Blazer

Be smart and use FREE strategies such as Instant Internet Marketing

No matter which method you use a vital component of getting listed by the search engines are keywords. Using the correct keywords is essential to achieving a high ranking at the search engines.

A keyword is the word or phrase an Internet user types into a search engine and, as all search engines employ a ranking algorithm based largely on the location and frequency of keywords on any given web page, it is obvious that keywords and high search engine rankings go hand in hand.

Gathering together a good keyword list which will attract the search engines to your site is essential and there are many different tools available to help you build that list. Some tools are free, such as the one provided by Google itself, or there are many commercial programmes available.

Spiders And How Search Engines Work

There are many ways to attract visitors to your website but it will be a search engine which brings most of your free traffic. And they do this by ‘spidering’ your website.

By submitting a sitemap to search engines such as Google and Yahoo, or submitting the site details to other search engines such as Live, you are in effect requesting the spiders to visit your site and place your pages in their index. A 'spider' is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. A spider will visit a web site, read the content and meta tags and also follow the internal links throughout the site.

The spider then returns all that data back to the search engine which then indexes all the information. Importantly, the spiders will also follow the external links from your site and index those as well, which is why it is important to have as many of your own links as possible on other peoples sites.

The spider will periodically return to the site to check for any information that has changed or for new links which have been added. The search engines produce rankings according to the information gathered by the spiders. The formula by which these calculations are carried out are called algorithms.

A very important point to note here is that NO ONE knows exactly how the search engine algorithms work. Though plenty of so called experts will try and tell you differently. Search engine optimisation is discussed elsewhere on this site but it is not an exact science as different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through and index a website.

The best way to improve search engine rankings is by producing good quality content and utilising the best search engine submission and optimisation software such as Traffic Blazer.