The best way to get traffic to a website is to publish great content, sit back, and let word of mouth spread the news. However, life is not always quite so simple. For one thing, generating great content is not necessarily easy. And even great content can sometimes use a head start so that it can really catch on.
Effective online strategies for driving traffic to a site fall into three general categories:
- Promotional
Intended to build buzz and word of mouth
- Technical
SEO activities intended to increase search engine visibility and rankings and drive traffic via inbound links
- Advertising
Such as the Google AdWords program explained in Part III of this book
The first two of these strategies fall under the general rubric of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), whereas advertising with AdWords (explained in detail in Part III) is, of course, SEM (Search Engine Marketing). I discussed crafting a campaign balance between SEO and SEM in Chapter 2.
This chapter explains how to publicize your site and increase traffic using techniques that do not cost money and do not involve tinkering with the HTML code or content of your pages themselves.
Google and most other search engines use several separate mechanisms:
A program that crawls the Web to find sites, also called a crawler or a spider. Once found (crawled), sites are placed in the search engine’s index.
Software that ranks sites in the search engine’s index to determine their order of delivery when someone uses Google to search for a particular keyword or phrase.
To start with, if your site hasn’t been found by a search engine, you won’t be ranked at all. So the first task is getting your site into the systems of Google and other search engines.
Warning
I do not recommend participating in any programs that ask you to pay for search engine listings, regardless of whether these programs are run by search engines themselves or by third parties. At best, these programs do nothing you cannot do yourself, and at worst they are scams.
If you have inbound links—links to your site—from other sites in a search engine’s index, then the search engine’s spider will find your site…eventually. But why not see if you can speed up the process?
Note
It’s peculiar but true: different search engines index different portions of the Web. Also, at any given time, it is impossible for any search engine index to include the entire Web because the Web is changing too fast!
The rub is that even by submitting a form to a search engine, there is no guarantee if, or when, your site will be included by a given search engine. An easy approach is to list your site using the search engine’s procedures, and check back in six months to see if you are included in the search engine’s index. If not, submit again. In other words, this is a process that requires patience and may produce limited results—but at least the price is right!
Google re-indexes frequently, so a better way to get listed in Google is to find a page that is already listed and get a link from it to your site.
Google is, of course, the single most important index. The good news about Google is that the Googlebots (its crawlers) are hyperactive. If you put up a new site that has a few inbound links from sites that are themselves at least somewhat linked-to, it is very unlikely that you will have to wait long to be indexed. Note, however, that this presents a cogent argument for arranging at least one or two inbound links before your site is ready to go live.
Note
Getting a site listed in an online categorized directory—particularly the Open Directory Project (ODP) or Yahoo!’s directory, as I explain in Working with Directories—is one of the most effective ways to get included in the search engine indexes themselves.
To summarize, search engines find the web pages they index by using software to follow links on the Web. Since the Web is huge, and always expanding and changing, it can be a while before this software finds your particular site. Therefore, it’s smart to speed up this process by manually submitting your site to search engines.
Table 3-1 shows some of the most important search engines to which you should submit your site, along with the URL for each site’s submission page. Some search engines, such as Ask.com, don’t have a submission page. Their attitude is that you should prepare a site map (see Taking Advantage of Site Mapping), and they’ll get to your site when they get there. But the big three—Google, Bing, and Yahoo!—each do have an explicit submission mechanism.
You may also want to use an automated site submission tool that submits your site to multiple search engines in one fell swoop. If you have inbound links, your site will get picked up automatically in any case, so site submission is not worth as much as it used to be. But the price is right, so what the heck?
If you are hosting your web content offsite, your web hosting company may well provide a utility with this functionality that you can use to submit the URLs for your hosted domains to a group of search engines. Figure 3-1 shows the results of a site submission using the tool provided by one web host (you’ll probably find that your web host provides something similar).
Note
Before using a site submission tool, you should prepare a short
list of keywords and a one- or two-sentence summary of your site as I
mentioned in Telling a Story and Creating a Plan
(you’ll be able to reuse the keywords and site summary as keywords and
description data in your meta
tags). Alternatively, if you have already created meta information for
your site, as I explain in Chapter 4,
you can use the keywords and description in your meta information for search engine
submissions.
Note
If the tool is provided by your web host, you will probably be able to submit only your domain, rather than directories within the domain—for example, http://www.digitalfieldguide.com but not http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/blog/.
If you search Google with a phrase like “search engine submit,” you’ll find a few free services that submit to a group of search sites for you. You’ll also find some search engine submission services that cost money.
Typically, the free submission sites try to up-sell or cross-sell you on a product or service, but since you don’t have to buy anything, why not take advantage of the free service? The best-known example of this kind of site is Submit Express, which will submit your URL to 40 sites for free (you’ll likely want to pass on the various offers you’ll find on the site).