Increase Website Traffic: A Five Minute Lesson

Instant success is a rare achievement for any website not created by a corporation or promoted by a celebrity. You simply cannot expect to create a website and get tens of thousands of people viewing it overnight. Ninety percent of people looking for websites find them via search engines. Here's the Team1Good system for dramatically enhancing your chances at receiving a high ranking with search engines.

Your success depends on your willingness to spend hundreds of hours manually submitting your website to search engines, article directories, RSS feeds, and press release directories, creating a social network presence (I prefer the partnering of Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and a blog on Google's Blogger.com ;)- And, working an additional few hundred hours optimizing your website's HTML code, keywords, links page- Then, you can squeeze in however many hours you work providing your content and updating everything I just mentioned. If you would like to skip all that work, contact Team1Good@inbox.com, so you can concentrate solely on providing your content. If you are up for getting down to all the aforementioned work- read on...


You've heard the metaphor "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." Well, your website is the "water", so make sure it's clean and inviting! How do you make sure your website is search engine friendly?

• Make sure you have plenty of relevant and interesting content on your website.
• Develop your website in HTML format- this is most easily read by search engine "crawlers".
• Static pages are also recommended as they are easier to read by the search engine crawlers.
• Try to include a sitemap, this helps the search engine find all the pages that are listed within your website.
• Update your website frequently so that your webpage doesn’t become ‘stagnant’ and drop down in ranking position.

Keywords are crucial to the search engine success of your optimized website. Identifying the right keywords for your product/service is essential. When creating keywords that you want to "target", research your competitors and see what words they are targeting. It is also recommended you make a list of the main products/services that you want to come up for in search engines. Remember, targeting the most common or general keyword you can think of is often not the best idea. This will often have the most competition and be harder to optimize than a specific keyword that is regional. Take the example of the keyword: "furniture"

As you can guess, the keyword ‘furniture’ would be very competitive because it is so general. Anybody could be searching for information about building furniture, furniture retailers, furniture repairs, outdoor furniture etc. coming up under this search term. The better idea is to be more specific, targeting keywords that are more relevant to your business such as ‘business furniture Sydney’. This has two main advantages: it's less competitive, making it easier to get to the higher ranking, and it brings much more targeted traffic/visitors to your website.

Once you have identified all of the keywords, implement them within your website. There are key areas where you will need to place these keywords in order to get your website ranking higher in the search engines. First, consider the Meta Tags. The meta-tags of a website can be found when you look in the Source Code of your website.

There are three main types of Meta Tags that are the most important to optimize. These are the crucial areas to include your keywords that you have found during your research.
The main Meta Tags are: Title Meta Tag, Keyword Meta Tag, Description Meta Tag.
Make sure that you place all your keywords within these meta-tags as these are one of the first places a search engine will look when indexing your site.

Now you are ready to get to work, implement your strategy, and increase your visibility! If you have followed all the steps I have given you, and made the necessary changes to your website, you are now all set up for submitting your website to all the search engines. Submitting your website to the search engines is the most time consuming process of a search engine optimization phase. There are over a million search engines. Thousands of websites are submitted each day. You must have patience in this phase, because it can take from 1-day to 12-weeks before your website is listed on a particular search engine.

It is a good idea to submit your website once a month to the search engines to remind them that you are still there and to alert them of any changes that have been made to your website. This encourages the search engine spiders to continue visiting your website and check for any updates. Also, it gives you a good chance to have your site re-indexed, if you happened to slip through the indexing process the first time.  I would also suggest not submitting your website more than once a month, as this can be considered spamming and your website will be banned. Remain patient!

Lastly comes what I believe is the most essential variable in how your website's popularity is affected. I'm talkin' 'bout "linking" your 'site to other websites. Developing links coming into your website is a crucial part of search engine optimization. Links from other websites to your site are considered by search engines to be a ‘vote’ of validation for your website, as they are referring and recommending their users to visit your website. This is the reason websites with more incoming links will have a better chance of ranking higher in the search engines than a website with no incoming links.

• Do not submit your website to link farms (this can result in your site being dropped from the search engine)
• Avoid paying for links or buying links (as above, can result in being dropped)

The best way to get links coming to your website is providing the best quality content you can offer your visitors.  Interesting articles and relevant topics will encourage other websites to link back to your site naturally, and you will see an increase in your link popularity over time. Yet another way is to find websites relevant to your website. This could be mutually beneficial, exchanging links. This is termed to be a reciprocal link, which is often an effective way to increase relevant links coming through to your website quickly and easily.

Follow the steps I just gave you and you are on your way to successfully optimizing your website! Yeah! I promise you- If you give your maximum effort and focus on what it takes to be successful, I assure you your website will increase it's search engine rankings and start a steady stream of visitors to your website.