If you want to increase your ranking on popular search engines or increase the traffic to your site you have to remember a few simple things. Geared towards content writers and business owners (not programmers!), this article will give most of the basics you need to establish your site as an authority in your field.

Setting Expectations

In general, most small and medium business clients expect that simply having a website is enough. We call this the "field of dreams" attitude where business owners think "If I build it, they will come [and buy stuff]." This is unfortunately completely and utterly untrue. No amount of design skill, or technical proficiency in features will cause a person to visit a website they do not know exists. The website must be actively advertised for new visitors to come consistently.

One form of advertising is putting effort into generating traffic from organic search engine results. Helping you achieve an increase in traffic from search engines is the goal of this article, however it takes times-- often many months-- to see results from this effort. Patience, persistence and determination are key to success in the search engine game.

In the mean time there are things you can do outside of your website that will generate traffic immediately. You absolutely must remember the traditional methods of informing a person about your company and by extension your website. You need to make sure that the address for your website is on your letterhead, business cards and phone book ad. It should be prominent on the signs at your physical office/store, on the side of your corporate cars and in every newspaper, magazine, radio and television ad you do.

Lastly, on the topic of setting expectations, it is critical to note that search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo are global in scope. If yours is a local small or medium business, then you really have no chance of ever getting into the top 100 results for general search terms like furniture, beauty supply or cake decorating without spending millions of dollars. Your goal should be to be the number one listing for your company's name (eg We-Create Inc.) and tag line (eg Engage Locally), and in the top 10 for generic search terms that include geographic information (eg internet software Waterloo Ontario).

With all of that in mind, let's get started.

Write content real people want to read.

The most common suggestion amongst the search engine optimization (SEO) experts is that all the content should be written so that people will want to read it, will remember your main points, and will hopefully tell their friends about you and/or your ideas.

Your goal should be to write content that is clear, concise and targeted at real people within your demographic and geographic area. Focus primarily on topics you know and write things you would want to find when doing a search. Lastly, while writing, think about words that real people would use when searching for content like yours and avoid using made-up, industry-specific, proprietary-sounding words to describe your ideas or product. Regular words work just as well and they are what people are searching for. Additionally, you don't need to go into great detail about your products or services. For local businesses your goal is to intrigue and interestpeople enough to get them to phone or visit you.

The major search engines reward original, concise and well written content that has proper grammar and spelling. Information always wins over marketing and content that is kept current trumps content that hasn't changed in years.

Consider adding a section to your website that allows you to write how-to or tips 'n tricks style content for your niche. Write something new at least once a month and don't be shy about informing your visitors about yourself. Shameless self-promotion nestled quietly inside information and articles that have real, immediate value will only serve to build your credibility as an authority-- indirectly selling your product or service for you. Basically, if you can draw people in from the search engines to pages like these then they just might stick around to see what else you have to offer them.

Avoid duplicate content

So you're convinced that you need some solid copy that informs visitors and establishes you as an authority. Why not use the sales copy from your suppliers or go copy content from some other place on the Internet? Because, if you do, Google will permanently blacklist you as soon as they catch you.

Remember we said "major search engines reward original content." At best, duplicate content will get you relegated to the "similar pages" listings of your competitors and suppliers search results while causing you other trouble with copyright and plagiarism advocates.

This doesn't mean you can't use existing ideas that you get from other source, it only means that you must put it into your own words and structure. The upside is that you can draw from multiple sources to create the most useful article you can for your clients. If successful, after a while, you could even end up with higher search engine placement than some or all of your original "research" sources.

Moreover, writing content from scratch will allow you to include all of the experience, wisdom and anecdotes that make you an expert and keep your customers coming back over and over.

Convince other websites to link to yours.

Getting slightly more technical we'll look at another simple thought time consuming way to get traffic from other sites on the Internet, but not directly from the search engines themselves.

You need to consider which other sites on the Internet could link to yours. The goal is not a simple volume of inbound links, but rather only those links from sites that could be considered loosely related to the content on your site.

In business the best place to get these is from your clients and suppliers. If you sell products from 50 different manufacturers, make an effort to have your website linked from the "where to buy" pages on each of their respective sites. If you are a service company, try to convince your clients to link to your site along with a testimonial of how great you are. Of course, exchange reciprocal links when the same logic applies in reverse. Also, be sure that your local business association groups (like the Chamber of Commerce) link to you from their sites if you are a member. Insist on it.

Additionally, if you get press coverage in traditional media insist that they include your web address in the written copy and request that make the link active (clickable) in their online archive.

Lastly, consider submitting your business to one of the hundreds of global and local online business directories (ConnectorLocal, DMOZ, Yahoo, Google Local, more). Be sure you take the time to properly categorize yourself and provide as complete a description of you and your organization as possible. Even with directories the goal is quality not quantity, so don't bother with sites you've never heard of or that aren't recommended to you by a professional. You'll just be wasting your time.

All of this effort will earn your website qualified traffic from dozens or hundreds of sources. Everyone will be coming to your site deliberately and with the intention of reading more about you, your ideas and your products and services.

The best news? Google cares about these inbound links too, and treats each one as a positive vote for your website. The original principle upon which Google was founded was very simple. Basically it was the idea that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. This mechanism of determining popularity vaulted Google to a household name in the late nineties and made the search engines far more relevant than they ever had been before.

The last point I'd like to make about inbound links is that the words in the link text have a huge impact on the value of the link. Links like "click here for more information" give the search engines no context about what "here" is. However, links like "visit We-Create Internet Software for more information" tell the search engines what is on the other end of the link and thus are valued more highly. These types of links are also much more likely to be clicked by a person when skimming an article. When you do convince someone to link to you, make an effort to ensure that they do so the right way. It's not always possible, if at least you're aware of what the right way is and can guide them.

Distinguishing yourself from the rest.

Years ago, any SEO expert would tell you that the first thing to do would be to make sure every single page on a website has a good meta-description and a concise and accurate list of meta-keywords and good content management systems will give you access to at least the meta description for each individual page in your site.

Today there are very few search engines that even bother to parse the meta-keywords list and when they do, they compare them with the body of your content before trusting them. Therefore they are a waste of time and you're better off writing a few more pages of quality content than you are itemizing keywords for every page of a website.

What is important are meta-description tags, though not for the same reasons they have been in the past. Many search engines, Google included, will make use of a well written and concise meta-description as the text that appears under your link in a search result.

Consider these two results from Google:

We-Create Internet Solutions.

We-Create Inc. partners with Bob FM to bring the Connector Series to London, Ontario. In a few short weeks, the Connector Series will hit...

www.wecreate.com/ - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

and

We-Create Inc. - Engage Locally

Get the best! We-Create helps you advertise and market your site with our Connector Suite of products and properties. Engage Locally with We-Create.

www.wecreate.com/ - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

The text in the first result is simply the text in the first paragraph on our old website, which just happened to be a teaser for a press release. The second was devised specifically to convert searchers on Google into visitors to our site and is the meta-description of the front page of our new website.

A human-targeted, clear and enticing meta-description can enable a site that ranks fourth or fifth in the results to get more overall traffic than the site that ranks first. This is because once on the search results page, people actually read the summaries and descriptions before clicking on the links.

However you can't write just one meta-description. To get the most bang for your buck you should write one that is specific to each page. You have a reason for having each page on your site, what is it? Write two short sentences about that and you'll see more traffic arriving at your site through the side door.

Think of the meta-description tag as a way to convert a searcher into a reader and thus make all the other search engine optimization efforts worthwhile.

Be patient, it takes time.

You've got good content that people are linking to, and your meta-description is ready to entice searchers into clicking on your link instead of the links for your competition, but when will you show up in the rankings? The only answer anyone can honestly give is "eventually... so be patient, its takes time." Sure, you can reduce the total time if you put lots of effort into honest SEO, but even then it can take weeks to get indexed and months before you see measurable results. If anyone promises you better, they're selling snake oil.

One reason for this is that search engines also consider various time factors when ranking your site in their search results. Metrics like how long it's been since your domain was first registered, as well as how many more years before it expires show them how dedicated you are to your website. Search engines also consider the longevity of the links to your site from others, and weight medium-value, long-term links much more heavily than high-value links you only obtained yesterday.

Summary

In general it all boils down to writing good content and advertising your site. Word-of-mouth advertising is one of the most influential factors in achieving success and only worthy content, properly presented will solicit links. After that, all you can do is sit back and wait for the traffic to roll in.

Good luck.

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Cameron Turner is a founder and the CTO of We-Create Inc. He is also co-champcion of the Communitech Profesional Web Software Developers P2P Group and has written two books about Google Maps and served as technical reviewer on a third about Advanced DOM Scripting.