The problem is, how exactly would people get to know that your website exists? Surely, they must first learn about its existence before they could visit it, right?

Well, it’s a fair assumption that 80% of the traffic that you’d be able to generate for your website would come from the search engines. Therefore, it is essential that you submit your website to as many search engines as possible. The process starts way before submission, of course, as you would have to optimize your web pages to constantly and efficiently win the attention of the search engine spiders.

Sounds like hard work? Well, this is something that you must do to assure a high volume of traffic for your website, dear friend. You have to employ certain tactics to get a better chance at online success.

But this is the realm of search engine optimization, or SEO as it is fondly called.

You could also try viral marketing and article marketing. The former would fetch for you an exponentially increasing traffic at a regular pace. The latter would result in a boost of users that would get to visit your web pages. Both strategies pursue the goal of exposing your website’s link to as many people as possible. Viral marketing would allow you to continuously spread your link through the use of a free product, which is usually an eBook or a special report, with words to encourage the recipients to distribute the same to their respective networks. Article marketing involves the submission of an article to the many article directories in the World Wide Web. Each article comes with a resource box that includes a link to your website.

Both strategies entail some work, specifically writing.

Are there easier ways to win traffic, you might ask? Well, there are some tactics that require little work yet provides substantial results. Let’s take a look at them.

• Increase your link popularity. Link popularity simply means the number of websites that contain links to yours. If you want to know what your website’s current link popularity is, just use the free tool at www.linkpopularity.com . Convincing other webmasters to display links to your web pages can either be very easy or very difficult. If you have befriended some webmasters throughout your online experience, this would be a cinch. Otherwise, expect to barter for such a spot on their websites, either in exchange for your goods or services, or by allowing them to display their links on your web pages as well.
• Buy spots. Most of the time, money does all the talking, and convincing. If you can’t talk them into allowing your links to be displayed on their websites, simply buy a spot on their web pages. Usually, you’d be given the spot for a month, with the option to renew the agreement every month thereafter.
• The previous two tips are about linking to other websites. Make sure that you choose popular websites. The purpose here is to garner visitors from highly visited sites to check out your web pages. If the other website generates less traffic than yours, your efforts would just be for naught.
• Try Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This would require some financial investment from you. Overture and Google AdWords are the most prominent PPC advertising programs today. You just have to pay the program for every visitor they manage to refer to your website. You don’t have to worry about going broke, as you could always set a daily limit of how much you want to spend.
• Try traffic exchange programs. There are free ones and there are paid ones. Free traffic exchange programs allow you to join a membership community. For every website you visit, you will earn a certain number of credits. You could use these credits to purchase traffic for your own site. Paid traffic exchange programs don’t require you to visit other websites, but you do have to bring out some cash to avail of their benefits.

The traffic strategy you employ should depend on the nature and the goals of your website. A careful study of the benefits and consequences of each tactic should be made before resorting to them. Make sure that they are a perfect match for what you want your website to achieve.

First of all you need to learn how to optimize your website to attract free traffic. I guess your first question should be, how do you go about optimizing your website to attract free traffic from search engines, such as Google?

One of the best ways in which to go about this is to setup link partners with other website owners in your particular niche. One way to do this is by joining a link exchange program, or you can search for willing web masters yourself. Be careful when choosing a link exchange program. Do a little research first or it could do more harm than good. You want a program that will get you links with partners in your niche and not too many too fast. Add them over time.

You can add link partners with low page rank in your niche but ultimately it will be in your best interest to set up links with high page rank websites that are related to your niche. It would also be a good idea to put your target keyword to optimize in the anchor text of your link that you give to link partners. Search engines will look at this when they are trying to determine what your site is about based on the link.

If you accumulate a larger amount of link partners, it will be good to vary your anchor text to several different keywords for your website, not just the one you want to optimize your website for the most. This will help you receive traffic for a number of keywords in your niche.

Another idea that will help you optimize your website for free search engine traffic is to run a complementary content-creation campaign. You can do this by creating new pages for your website based upon keywords that are receiving little traffic, but have no competition. This will help you to dominate all of the traffic for that given keyword and be ahead of the competition by being on top of the search engines.

That’s the basics of how to optimize your websites to attract free search engine traffic. Look for more of these articles to come.

To sum up, get inbound links to your website, create and optimize extra pages of your website for keywords that no one is competing for.

To rank relevantly within search engine results, each website must be considered relevant to a particular search algorithm for a given keyword or phrase. Keyword selection can be a challenge to both experts and neophytes. While anyone can come up with various words that may be used when searching for their product or service, these words may not be the ideal mix for search engine ranking. Why? If a marketer chooses a popular keyword phrases, he or she and a million other businesses compete for top placement. Top SERP placement is dense, searchers typically giving up after the first three pages. To succeed, one must use relevant keywords that are not being used by everyone else and that are searched for quite often. This may include misspellings and other alternative data. After finding relevant keywords and phrases, the results must encourage conversion or success based on each business’ criteria. For example, while it may be possible for a DVD rental firm to get top listings under the search criteria “free DVD rentals”, the person who visits is looking for free merchandise and will leave if its not found.

For optimal search engine rankings, a page will be optimized for only one to two popular but non-competitive keywords or keyword phrases.

Keyword Coding

HTML coding are two words most people never want to hear, especially in a learning environment. But it’s important to understand the basic web page header structure and where the search engines look to find key words for search engine ranking pages (SERP).

Sites rank highest when each page is optimized separately. For instance, a business may have one website with unlimited interlinking pages. The top page must be named “index.HTML.” While each sub-page may be named according to the designer or programmer’s preference. Ideally sub-pages are named according to the strongest keywords or phrases for each business. Both the domain name and the URL or complete web address string, are important factors in determining search engine relevancy

Three important META tags are on each individual HTML page located between the “head” tags: description, keywords and title. The webpage description is the short sentence that displays after the listing name is the SERP’s. The keywords are not viewed by the casual surfer, but offer a clear-cut description of what is found on the website or who’s behind it. The title is the most condensed of all metatags. The title should repeat the top 1-2 keywords and describe what the site is about.

We can take the keyword theme as far as necessary, yet success through search engine optimization is not a 100% guaranteed way to gain top rankings and can often dilute the site and information quality by becoming a string of repetitive keywords, not value-added information. Some of these tactics include adding pages of keyword-rich articles solely to rank high. Another is developing a mini-empire of interrelated sites not for expert information, but solely to make the sites appear more important and relevant to the main site focus.

To ensure a small 30-page website is optimized, it must first renew keyword use each month to find the most popular terms for the three major search engines, Yahoo!, Google and MSN. Each page must be optimized for different but interdependent terms to strengthen the site as a whole. This involves new keyword research and website content for each page every month.

An example of a good ecommerce site using paid advertising instead of keyword optimization is buy http://automotive.com. Notice the content is relevant to the visitor entering and seeking the product. In contract, auto http://anything.com, a competitor site, relies heavily on keyword content, uses text that has no purpose and confuses the visitor with too many navigation links and useless words meant for search engines alone. Though this may gain rankings with work and keyword saturation, it can also damage a business reputation and ultimately lead to less sales.

Needless to say there are far more aspects to choosing the right keywords than I can cover in this article but the information provided here should give you a good insight into understanding how important it is to design a website that is keyword friendly.

Let’s face it, there is no magic bullet when it comes to successfully promoting your online business. There are pros and cons to almost everything you do. If you never develop a plan and put that plan into motion, you’ll never know if that’s the plan that will ultimately be the “magic bullet” that launches your online business to new found success.

Do give up! If at first you don’t succeed, TRY, TRY, AGAIN! There is a lot to learn when starting a online business. Give yourself a break and don’t set unrealistic goals. Contrary to popular beliefs, having a successful, profit making, online business doesn’t happen overnight.

So, Good Luck, make money and have fun doing it.