One simple way to boost website traffic is to get listed in search engines. When people search for terms related to your site, hopefully they'll find your site listed in the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) or two.
Many sites are found by the 'spiders' the search engines use to travel from site-to-site and page-to-page. The odds of them finding your site increase with the number of inbound links you have to your site. (That's a whole chapter or course that we can address some other time.)
It can be difficult to get inbound links for the spiders to follow to your site, especially if it's new. But you can submit your site to most search engines so they know that you exist and will begin the process of evaluating your site.
This is especially important for the new Bing search engine from Microsoft. If you were indexed on previous iterations of Microsoft's search engines, you'll likely show up on Bing. But it's always a good idea to make sure the major search engines know about your site as well as any boutique, vertical market or niche search engines that would be appropriate for your site.
Keep in mind that you can often test to see if your site is indexed by a particular search engine by going to it and typing, "site:mydomain.com" where mydomain.com is your website address. (No spaces between "site:" and your domain.)
Google Webmaster Tools also has an application for checking the status of your site.
If your site does not appear to be indexed, you'll want to submit your URL to the search engines.
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Bing: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx
These 3 search engines account for roughly 90% of all Internet searches and many of them feed their information to smaller search engines.
Just because you've submitted your site to search engines is no guarantee that you will be indexed or that you'll receive a favorable ranking. There are other factors that will affect your rankings. Find what I've written on that subject by searching through the 'Search Engine Optimization' category on my blog.
Understand that it may take some time for the search engines to crawl your site once you've submitted it, and it may take additional work to get your pages indexed for coveted keywords. We recommend that you have a sitemap on every site. But by submitting your sites to the search engines, you've made a pretty good start on getting a return on your investment!
Kurt Scholle, the Website ROI Guy
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