When advertising on the Internet, you will want to use as many low cost or NO cost advertising sources as possible...That is the big advantage of the internet over traditional methods of advertising. Sending out follow-up letters to interested people is FREE...There are thousands of sites where you can place FREE classified ads.
Many service providers have a section for Free ads...Placing a Signature File on the bottom of all of your emails and message boards is Free. Best of all though, Search Engine Advertising is Free.
Search Engines are misunderstood in a major way...It is possible to get 100 of 1,000 people a day visiting your site through the major search engines, but it ISN'T EASY. You CANNOT just go through and submit your site to 350 search engines using automated software...It doesn't work that well. You will notice little or no added traffic from such methods.
In all honestly, there really are only 8 search engines which people really get traffic from. The other ones are much smaller and if you go to their sites you may see 1,000,000 hits, but when you do a search you only see 300 or so hits. This means that everyone has Submited their sites there, BUT almost no one is using them to do any searches for anything.
The eight major search engines will produce 95% or more of your search engine traffic...They are:
Alta Vista ---- http://www.altavista.com/
Excite -------- http://www.excite.com/
HotBot -------- http://www.hotbot.com/
Info Seek ----- http://www.infoseek.com/
Lycos --------- http://www.lycos.com/
Open Text ----- http://www.opentext.com/
Web Crawler --- http://www.webcrawler.com/
Yahoo --------- http://www.yahoo.com/
The problem is that if you are not listed in the top 20 of a specific search engine under a certain keyword, you have little or no chance of ever actually being found. There are
millions of people Submiting their sites to these search engines and if you are coming up in the 125,021 place, NO ONE will ever come to your site through that search engine.
Learning how to submit your site to the search engines and getting top positions isn't always easy...Think about it...You have 1,000,000 people trying to make sure they get ahead of you in line. You have to learn a lot of how to get high listings on the search engines and just what to do to take advantage of them.
Think about it though...500 hits a day are possible from search engines...How much would you have to pay to get that kind of traffic from banner advertising.
The cheapest place I have seen for targeted advertising lately for banners cost $250 for 40,000 banner viewings. If you had a banner with a click through ratio of 5% (Which is high) you would get 2,000 hits for your $250.
So with 500 hits a day or 3500 hits a week, that would be equal to $437.50 a week in FREE advertising you could get just for getting extremely high listings on the search engines. Is an extra $400 profit a week worth taking the time to learn how to get high listings on search engines? It is to me!
Here are a couple of Quick Tips on Getting High Listings on Search Engines:
1) Write down every keyword you can think of which applies to your site that you want to bring targeted traffic in from.
2) Become a Digital Detective. Step two is to go to some of the major search engines and do a search for your competition. Use some of the keywords you would use to look for your site.
Visit these sites and write down other keywords you might not have thought about. Also save some of the pages so you will be able to look at them later to see what they are doing to get into the top 10 on a certain keyword.
3) Investigate these pages thoroughly...Start trying to notice what is similar among them. Whatever it is that is similar is probably what is getting them up on the tops of the search engines.
NOTE: All the Search Engines have different requirements!
How many times is the keyword being mentioned in each page? To get high placement you will probably have to create a version of your site that is different for EVERY ONE of the search engines separately. This is time consuming, but well worth the cost.
4) Examine the Meta Tags
If you have an html editor, when you look at the html of the page, you will be able to see it's Meta Tags. They will look something like this at the top of the page.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Home Business</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Everything you wanted to make money in home business.">
<META name="keywords" content="home business, MLM, network marketing, money, computers">
</HEAD>
I am NOT telling you to copy theirs...I am telling you to look and see if they use a keyword 5 times, then you probably should do that too. See what is similar between each of the top ten pages in a category. You can learn ALOT this way on how each search engine works.
5) Begin preparing and Submiting your pages after following the rules that you found out about your keywords. The first search engine you should start with is Infoseek usually. When you submit to them you will find they will index your page within minutes so it is GOOD way to test your pages for rankings.
To help everyone with their submissions, I have created a Traffic Building e-book which contains the submission forms for ALL 8 of the major search engines. So, instead of having to go to eight different places and hunt for the "add url" sections, you can do it all from:
http://www.bizpromo.com/traffic.exe