Who are the Major Search Engines - for webmasters the following services are the most important to be listed in as they can potentially generate so much traffic. AOL Search, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Direct Hit, Excite, FAST Search, Google, HotBot, Inktomi, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN Search, Netscape Search, Northern Light, Open Directory, RealNames, Yahoo.

Submit manually to the major search engines listed above. I suggest not trusting the all important submission process to the automated services for the major search engines but use them to cover the hundreds of lesser search engines if you wish to have total coverage.Re-submit regularly, after every major update to the site or at least every six months.


Develop Unique and Appropriate Keyword phrases. Individual keywords are usually too competitive to rank well with unless they are very unique to your business. Instead develop 2 or 3 word phrases that precisely describe your business. If your business is generally local include the city or state as one of your keywords.

Location and Frequency of your keywords are critical. Keywords should appear in your page title as well as high up in the page text. Location of keyword placement is critical. Other important places that your keywords should appear are the meta description, meta keywords, alt tags, headers and link addresses.


Many people focus on linking in order to improve their search engine rankings. That’s important but don’t forget that the links themselves can be one of your biggest sources of traffic!

Probably the easiest way to invite links (apart from searching out related sites and writing to each one) is to add a “link” section to your pages where webmasters can choose a banner, button or text link to place on their site. On the same page, they can also submit their own site for linking. That should help you swap links without being swamped by sites looking for free placement.

The most critical factor when requesting a link though is where the site places it. Links on the home page always do better than a link buried on one of the internal pages and a good banner or graphic link on a site with content related to yours will usually get more clicks than a text link.

If you find that your links aren’t appearing on the pages you want, there are a couple of simple remedies that you can use.

The first is to ask for a better position! If you have a good relationship with the webmaster or if it’s a small site, there’s a good chance that they’ll agree. It certainly won’t hurt to ask.

Not everyone is so generous though, and another option is to offer something in return. A link in a similar position on your own site can make a good deal if your sites are of similar size but you can also offer content or even a special page for that site’s users.

If you have a site about furniture for example, and you want a link at a top directory for home furnishings then you could create a special welcome page for users of that site to draw them deeper into yours and deliver targeted ads. You might even want to go as far as creating a sort of co-branded version of your site for their users to click into. As long as you’re getting paid when the users click on the ads, what do you care whose design they’re looking at?


There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.

Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google allow ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with ads.


Post them on your site or submit them to some of the hundreds of article directories on the web. Put your URL in the byline and folks will click


Write, write, and write some more. Post your writings on forums and blogs, do a Google search for “post your comments” or “post a reply”. Start leaving comments - this goes hand-in-hand with getting involved


Stumble it, Digg it, and add it to your delicious bookmarks. You will get traffic. Sometimes you get less than you hoped for, sometimes you get a fire hose of traffic, but you will get it. Participate in writing projects.


It seems so simple, but make sure you ask visitors to bookmark your site or save it in their Favorites list. This substantially increases their chances of returning.