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help searchengines 26steps

There are numerous way to drive traffic to your site - we've laid out the most useful information for you below.

ClientReady staff is available to help you build a search engine marketing plan, explain everything to you in PLAIN ENGLISH, and to actually do the submissions for you if you like (fees are involved for these additional services).

Major Methods of Driving Traffic
Conventional Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization

(AllTheWeb, AltaVista, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Google, HotBot, Inktomi, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, Open Directory, Teoma, Yahoo, etc.)
* Highly recommended

OVERVIEW:
This is a long term strategy. Search engines are very important means of driving traffic to your web site. You have to register your URL with a specific search engine in order for your site to be found in someone's search results.

You will need to submit your site and in some cases the main pages in your site to the engines of your choice.

You will need to OPTIMIZE your pages so that the search engines look favorably upon them and rank you highly.

Optimization is a non-exact science because the search engines don't tell you what they are looking for, AND they change their criteria every so often, without notice. Companies that specialize in this effort often charge thousands of dollars a year to optimize a handful of pages and keep up with them.

PROS:
You aren't paying for the clicks to your site, as with Pay for Click method.

CONS:
Takes a lot of time and effort goes into researching the best TERMS that you want to target and to submitting your pages to the engines. Slow to see results because it takes anywhere from a week to several months for the search engines to start listing your site.

Pay Per Click Search Engines

* Highly recommended

OVERVIEW:
This is a quick to implement traffic strategy. Pay per click search engines enable you to only pay for the volume of traffic that visits your site. Typically, you pay an amount that you agree to every time someone clicks a link that sends them to your site.

You open a free account and place some money into it.. say $100. Then you choose a number of keywords that you want people to find your site for.. like "clothing for men"... "mens sweaters".. and "tshirts". You agree to pay say 15 or 20 cents per click.. and each click is driving traffic to your site. Once your account is depleted, you have to add more $ to keep coming up as a result, or not.

Don't spend more than 40 cents a click, and 15 cents is much better. Many novice users blow through all their money by overbidding for the terms they want. The best strategy is to get a large, wide selection of terms that are not too expensive and leave the really expensive terms for those with deep pockets.

These are the two major Pay For Click companies: Overture.com or Google Ad words

PROS:
Instant traffic. You can quickly determine if it's cost effective to spend some $$ in order to drive sales.

CONS:
Can be costly if you are not getting the sales you expected to justify whatever you're spending.

Link Swapping

* Highly recommended

The more links that you have back to your site the greater the chance a search engine will have in finding your web site. This can be accomplished by having other people add links to your website from their site.
Email Marketing Gathering user names and email addresses from your site and emailing a newsletter to those people is a great way to market your offerings. HOWEVER, you MUST use a 3rd party newsletter service for this type of marketing - please review this info thoroughly if you're interested in Email Marketing.
Fax Blasting There are many businesses that offer the service of sending your message to a mass fax list. We are not sure how affective this method of marketing is, however it is another option that you might want to consider.

Conventional Search Engines

Costs to Submit Your Site

Engine Cost Description
AllTheWeb.com (FAST Search)
http://www.alltheweb.com
Free  
AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com
Free and Express Inclusion $39/6 months  
AOL Search
http://search.aol.com
Free Recommended, because they supply results to many engines
Ask Jeeves
http://www.askjeeves.com
First URL $30, every URL thereafter $18 ea.  
Google
http://www.google.com
Free and Paid Submissions Highly recommended - Google is a VERY important engine to get listed on because they supply results to many other major search engines
HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com
Free  
Inktomi
http://www.inktomi.com
Per URL basis. First URL $39/yr., each URL thereafter $25/yr. Recommended, because they supply results to many engines
LookSmart
http://www.looksmart.com
$49 Set-up Fee Pay per click fees apply
Lycos
http://www.lycos.com
Free Free submission of one page of your web site
MSN Search
http://search.msn.com
$49 Set-up Fee Pay per click fees apply
Netscape Search
http://search.netscape.com
Free Recommended, because they supply results to many engines
Open Directory
http://dmoz.org
Free Recommended, because they supply results to many engines
Overture
http://www.overture.com
Pay Per Click Recommended, guaranteed traffic for those with even minimal monthly ad budgets
Teoma
http://www.teoma.com
First URL $30, every URL thereafter $18 ea.  
Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com
Free for non-biz sites, or Express 7 day service for business subs, $299/yr., recurring Highly recommended - Yahoo is a very important engine to get listed on