by: Daegan Smith

So, you've set up your first website in the hope that you can attract more visitors to your business. You've worked a few months planning, designing, developing and paying for a great web host. All that remains to be done is for you to step back, and marvel at your creation, and wait for the visitors to come gushing in.

And so you, wait – and wait, and wait, and wait.

But the visitors don't come gushing in. Your store is open, but the customers are not there. Your beautiful website just sits there while the dust gathers at its feet.

You don't get it.

Suddenly you decide to Google your website to see if punching in the keywords for search will yield any results. Nada.

Ooops, wait. There it is, at page 99999 of the results page.

You begin to see the big problem.

Your beautiful site is worthless if people can't find it. People can't find it if it doesn't get listed prominently on the internet.

There are billions of web users who are desperately searching for their needs. Their needs may actually be the service or product you are offering. How can direct all these people to your website?

Well, the good news is, there is hope. The amazing truth of the internet is that your company, no matter how small or large has a chance at generating huge amounts of traffic if you learn a few neat tricks of traffic generation.

Get Inside the Engine

If you want traffic to come crashing at your door, you need to know how internet users learn of the sites that interest them. There are quite a few ways how one learns of websites of interest: print ads, spot ads, referrals from friends, and others. But the most important and widely used avenue is the search engine.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo search, and MSN search all rely on a simple procedure. They have special 'spiders' that crawl all over the web visiting sites to index them and collect data about them. The spiders then use this data in generating results of any number of search queries.

To rank highly in the results page a normal site will have to wait a few months or so. But you can accelerate that rise by following the following tips.

Turn Your Site to Gold

If you want your site to immediately hit the top spot at the search results page you need to know what attracts the search engines' spiders the most.

1. Keywords

These spiders are constant looking for the content of these pages. If your website contains juicy keywords that directly relate to your business. The chances of having your site increase in popularity are better. You can put these keywords in either your tag or within your article itself.

For example, a site that sells cars should have the following words saturating his page: car, auto, sales, automobile, van, SUV, truck, and so on.

2. Index Your Pages

Spiders move from site to site, and from page to page by following the links that are listed in every page they visit. If you have pages that are not listed in your index page, there is a big possibility that the spiders will miss those pages. So make sure all your links are, as much as possible, at the index page. If not, at least make sure there is a direct and easy path from the index page to every page in your site.

It also helps if you have other sites whose links point to you. So get all your friends who have good sites up to show a link that leads to your site.

3. Optimize your content

Remember rule number1? Keywords have a great impact on a web site's popularity. However, spiders are also aware that some sites abuse the use of keywords. And they know how to act accordingly. Instead of getting a better ranking, you might find your ranking falling instead.

You could add more and better content to your site. This allows you to increase the keyword density in your website without abusing any search engine rules. Examples of this would be to link tutorials, essays, and other material to your site. If these materials are keyword rich, that would increase the ranking of your web site.

4. Paid Advertisements and Directories.

You could also have your site advertised by Google or have it listed on the Yahoo directory. It may cost you money, but it does accelerate your rise to prominence faster.

Try Mixing Them Up

Mix and match these various strategies according to your needs and your capabilities. Soon enough, you will find your website up there among the most popular in the land. And as for the traffic? You'll have so much traffic you won't have time to close your gates.