24/7 Web Traffic your guide to getting traffic to your website

When webmasters start searching for ways to drive traffic to their sites, the first thing they usually stumble over is search engine traffic. Search engines are a great source of traffic, for starters it’s free, and you have also pre-qualified the visitor as they have a) searched for material relating to your site, and b) clicked the link based on the description of the site put up by the search engine. The next thing most webmasters will do is start submitting their sites to all the major search engines, which usually means Google and Yahoo then MSN. The smarter webmaster will have also optimised his site with keywords and meta tags so these search engines will list the site correctly. For many of them that is the end of the search engine quest. They are listed in Google, Yahoo and maybe MSN. But that shouldn’t be where the search engine submissions stop.

As a webmaster you should never dismiss the smaller search engines as part of your search engine strategy. While the major engines will cover most of searching done on the Internet, you never know when one of the minor engines will yield some results. Since it costs nothing to register with the engine all that’s required is a bit of your time. And after all, one sale can more than a make up for your investment in time spent submitting your website to the smaller search engines. Most search engines will provide information about registration that will provide you with some tips on how to create the registration profile. In some cases, the process is very quick, provided you have all the details and keywords handy. Following the advice on one site can also help on several others as far as getting listed is concerned.

Try one or two of the search engines first, just to get a feel for how much time and effort is involved. Then, you will be able to decide if registration is something that you want to do on your own, or farm out to a submission service. The results may not be immediate though, so don’t write off the smaller search engines too quickly. Another thing to bear in mind is that as most webmasters don’t take the trouble to list in smaller search engines, there is less competition for the keywords especially in smaller niches than there is in Google et al. So instead of showing up on page 25 of Google searches, you may pick up more visitors by being listed in the top ten of a smaller engine. It’s likely that more people will look at the first page of the smaller engine than that 25th page on Google.

So when you are looking for search engine traffic for your website, don’t forget Google, but also remember there are others out there which may benefit you with traffic too. Not all searches are done in Yahoo, or Google and even MSN doesn’t have the monopoly on the rest of the internets searches.

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