If your site is to be successful it can't exist in splendid isolation - it has to be visible to generate web traffic from the search engines.

Free Traffic To Your Web Site From The Search Engines.

A brief video explaining the basics and why you should care.

Site traffic from the search engines can either be bought or be free. If you want traffic fast and you have a commercial reason for doing it, then you can accelerate the somewhat cumbersome search engine process by buying traffic.

If you elect to buy traffic initially, you can analyze your traffic from your site statistics and if after a period you decide you are getting adequate free traffic in addition to your paid traffic, then you could consider stopping purchased traffic.

However, relying wholly on the free traffic option is attractive to most website owners. To maximise this, websites need to achieve adequate positioning in search engine result pages. The website’s address (URL) needs to be visible if searchers are to click on it and find their way from the SERP (Search Engine Result Page/s) to the website.

The higher a site ranks in the search engines, the better. Any result ranked on page 2 of the SERP is going to be less fruitful than results on page 1 and the further results appear down the rankings, the worse it gets, as you would expect. In order to achieve higher rankings in the SERPs website owners carry out a process known as search engine optimisation.

Search Engines succeed or fail by the results they deliver – if they cannot return relevant search results quickly then they fall back in the user stakes resulting in falling advertising and related revenues. The Search Engines accordingly use very complex rules (algorithms) to determine relevance and thus ranking in their efforts to give the best user experience they can.

The most popular search engine by far is www.google.com and accordingly most people optimising sites for the search engines do it with Google in mind. The current criteria in vogue (search engines change their rules often) revolve around:

CONTENT – Does the site give visitors sufficient useful unique information?

RELEVANCE – Keywords & Keyword Phrases – Which words and how they are used.

POPULARITY - Inward Links – How many relevant (and preferably well rated) sites/pages link to the subject site.

Content
Mostly 200 or more words on the site’s homepage are enough. If less than 200 words are used, then the pages immediately linking to the home page need to be big on content and the linking and explanation text needs to be carefully crafted.

All the criteria that you would apply to good copy that sells applies here as the homepage must sell both to visitors and the search engines.

Relevance
Keywords are those words that define a web page's subject matter and appear relatively frequently in the page content. Keywords and keyword phrases are an exercise in anticipation, figuring what searchers are likely to be looking for and how they will express this when they type their query into the search engines.

Matching search terms with keywords is more art than science but much software has been written in attempt to simplify the selection process. Correct use (and not overuse) of keywords in critical places assists ranking considerably.

Popularity
The popularity of any given page is driven by the number of inbound links a page has and the quality of those links. Links typically should embody the keywords mentioned above for maximum impact (where practical). To gain more inbound links see linking.

Often forgotten is that not all a page's links come from outside the website. Multipage websites’ pages link internally also, via the menu system which is usually a system of links. If these links can be properly focussed, this will assist a page's popularity.

Often, it is only important that one or two pages appear in the search engines and the optimisation should focus there rather than try and optimise an entire site. After all once the visitor has found your site’s homepage they will be able to find their way from there around your site if the navigation is clear. Thus all your other pages should be link-focused on the important pages for best results.

To assist the internal linking process, a properly constructed sitemap can also be very helpful both for search engine and visitor purposes.

TIME FRAME
If you are in a hurry for traffic consider paying for it. You will, if you do it right, have traffic within days. If you want to go the free route of the majority, you will need to wait some weeks, even months if your site is new to the web. If Google already has you listed and you do some work on your site, Google will as a matter of routine re-evaluate your site. This will happen within a month, often within a few days, it can be a bit of a lottery. Some of the other Search Engines need to be told directly and react slowly.