Everyone wants traffic on their website - more traffic means more customers and more customers usually means a happy business owner. A lot of people ask the question, "Why is nobody visiting my website?"
A better question to ask might be, "What steps can I take to improve the level of traffic to my site?"
One great way, is to take advantage of Search Engines.

Search engines are powerhouses that drive traffic to millions of websites every day. People are always looking to find information or products online - so why not have them find yours first! The best way to ensure that these searchers find you is to make sure your website is fully optimized when the search engines come around to index your pages. So how do you do this?

First a little background... the top 3 search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN have roughly 95% of the market share (approx. stats as of July 2006). These search engines generally index websites by sending out automated computer programs known as "crawlers" or "spiders" to catalogue all the information they can find on various web pages. The search engines then use complex algorithms in an attempt to emulate how a human would sort through the data gathered by the crawlers. Once finished sorting they will deliver what they believe to be he most relevant pages as results. The best thing you can do as a site owner is to make certain your webpage is fully optimized when these spiders and crawlers come by for a visit. Supplying them with the proper information they require will help you achieve better rankings.

Lots of websites don't even have basic information available for these crawlers. Let's use an example and say your webpage has a title tag that says "Main Page", your description is "My Website", your first line says "Welcome to Buster's Homepage", and finally there is a picture of a large brown dog doing a trick. A human visitor would probably assume it's a website you've made for your dog Buster (with very little information on it!) Now let's say a crawler comes to visit the same webpage. Being a computer program I think it's safe to assume it will have less logic and sub-par vision in comparison to a human. All it can do is read through your code and collect information, so what information have you provided it with? We have: "Main Page", "My Website", "Buster's Homepage" and an image file that it can't see.
Do you see where I'm going with this?

Search engine crawlers collect data, but you are the one that needs to provide QUALITY information for it to gather. You would be better off to have something along the lines of "Buster the German Shepherd Dog" as your title, "How to Train German Shepherds", as a description and make sure you have text to accompany your image, perhaps "dog training" - or something along those lines. The key is to be descriptive and relevant to the subject matter. Help the search engines, and they will help you!

The example above is extremely basic but illustrates clearly how crawlers collect useful data. Be sure to provide them with the proper information and you will be rewarded. There are numerous other ways to make sure traffic reaches your website, a few examples include:

This article barely scratches the surface of what can be involved in fully optimizing your website, but does give you some insight and a few ideas of the types of things that can be done to improve overall traffic and even the quality of your website's content.

Whether you decide to optimize your website yourself, or have a professional do it, make sure you take the time to do it correctly or you will be losing valuable visitors! Steer clear of anyone who tells you they can guarantee you a #1 spot in the Google rankings for certain words or terms, this is not possible because Search Engines are constantly evolving and adjusting the way they evaluate pages. While a claim like this is not realistic, you can however ensure that you give yourself the best possible chance of ranking well. This is achieved by following best practices and creating quality content that is relevant to what your potential visitors are looking for.

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