The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here.

Now that your website is built and you are sure it’s ready to receive traffic and convert sales, you are ready to go out and get some people to come visit your new website.

How Do I Get Traffic To My Website?

That is the most asked question on the web. Everyone wants more traffic and there are a lot of different ways to get that traffic. Some of it depends on your monthly budget for promoting your website, (You do have one I hope), and some of it depends on how well you followed the earlier steps in the New Web Business Guide when planning and building your website.

Where Will My Visitors Come From?

Search Engines

The number one source of traffic for your website is from the search engines. Notice I used the plural, search engineS. Do not think that just because google is the biggest search engine that you should only focus your attention on google. All of the search engines can send you traffic that will convert to sales.

Many people say that msn and yahoo traffic convert at a higher rate than google. That may or may not be true depending on your business and what you sell. There are also other smaller search engines you will want to get traffic from.

Search Engine Submissions

To submit or not submit, that is the question. Different people tell you different things about submitting your website to the search engines. It used to be very important to do so, but I have found that having the major search engines find you is better.

How do they find you? Easy, you need a link from a website that is already established and already gets crawled often by google. It can be as simple as making some comments on the right forums or blogs with a link back to your website. Provided they do not use nofollow tags. That is why I said plural blogs and forums. Don’t stop at one.

The search engines will crawl those sites and find the link to your site an follow that link. When the spider gets to your website, it will follow all of the links that go to your other pages if you have done a good job on your website’s navigation or internal linking.

If you find that your website is still not getting crawled after a couple of weeks, then by all means go ahead and submit it to yahoo, google, and msn.com.

I do submit to the smaller search engines for listings because they are not as sophisticated as google, yahoo, msn, aol, and ask.com. You can type search engine submissions into google and find a lot of free search engine submission sites. These will hit a lot of the smaller search engine for you.

ORGANIC SEO is an seo term you should know. This is where the search engines compare the content on your webpage to see if it is relevant to what a user has typed in as a search term.

The more relevant you are to what the user typed in, the higher the search engine will rank you. That is a little over-simplified because your relevancy to the search term is only one of the things that the search engines use to determine how high you rank for a particular key phrase. However, your content is the most important factor in determining how you rank for a particular keyword or phrase. (some seo gurus may not agree. :))

Link Popularity is also very important to how well you rank in the search engines for the keywords you target with your content. You need other websites, blogs, and directories also linking to you. Each link is like someone voting for your website.

Link popularity is not about quantity over quality. It is not about websites with high google page rank linking to you. It’s about websites, blogs, and directories with subjects that are relevant to your topic that matters.

If you own a website that is all about getting people to sign up for your gardening newsletter and a bicycle parts website with a pr6 links to you, it is not as valuable as a pr3 link from a lawn care website or probably even a real estate or home improvement website.

The added value to those links is that you are not just getting those links to help your search engine ranking, you are hoping to get people who visit those websites to also visit your website. They are likely the same type of audience you want to attract.

So be smart about link building. Don’t buy into link building schemes that offer to build your link popularity overnight. Don’t buy into reciprocal linking or even three way link schemes. If anything you read looks like it was designed to fool the search engines, it will likely hurt you in the long run.

To get great organic listings in the search engines, put great content into your website and get relevant sites to link to you.

Web Directories

Link Farms There are a lot of web directories out there and not all of them will help you get better search engine placement. Some are what we call link farms where they list just about everyone who submits a link to them. They have no content and they are not related to your website in any way. So links from these link farms are not going to help you.

Free Web Directory Listings can be good places to start. Free does not mean they are a bad place to get a link. Look for web directories that are well-made and maintained and those that are related to your niche or at least have categories that are related to what you offer visitors.

Paid Web Directory Listings does not necessarily mean they are a good place to get links just like free does not equal bad. Look for how much actual content they have in their directory besides just links. Consider the page rank of the actual page your link will appear on and not the page rank of their main page.

Don’t take their word for how many visitors they get daily unless they can prove it. And it doesn’t matter to you how much traffic they get. It matters how much traffic the page your link will be on gets and where your link will appear. Ask for statistics that show you the traffic for that page and if they have anything on how many people actually click links to visit sites they link to.

They may not have all of the information you want, but it does not hurt to ask. If they just refuse to provide any statistics, then buy a link elsewhere. Ask exactly where your link will appear on which page. Don’t just use the auto buy button and hope they give you good placement. If you don’t ask for it they can assume you don’t care.

In the next chapter of the new web business guide, I will be going over pay per click advertising and organic search engine optimization.