There are a number of ways to drive traffic to your website, and you need to use as many of them as you can as often as you can. You will not succeed in any business online unless people find you, and you have something to offer that is of value to them.

Here is a list of actions that will help:

Provide worthwhile information
Make sure you please the search engines as well as your visitors
Give as much as you can; it will come back to you tenfold

It's a short list and may not be exclusive, but under each category are several subcategories.

Let's deal with information first. The Internet is the largest storehouse of information that has ever existed, and it grows massively every minute of every day. Users go online most often to seek information.

What do you do?

Think about your own actions. How do you find the information you want in this mountain of data? The same way as almost everyone else: search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Jeeves or MSN, right? How far down the list of sites presented to you do you look. As far as Page 21? Not likely. Most searches are restricted to the first or second pages. If your listing is on Page 21, it might as well not be there at all.

Search engines are computerized indexes. They make their money from advertisers. They satisfy their paying clients, their advertisers, by bringing only the right types of eyeballs to the specific pages on which each advertiser presents his message. The computers try to determine what content specific types of humans will want to search. They are not yet perfect at what they do, but they employ hundreds of brainy people whose job is to make them a little better each day.

Optimization

What do you want when you search for something, anything? Plenty of relevant information. That is what the search engines want, too. They are a little clumsy in their selections so far. That's why they have to be fed keywords to get their attention and to make them 'understand' the purpose of your page. This is called search engine optimization, or SEO.

An example: let's assume we have a page that talks about search engine optimization. Look on the Web under that phrase, as you will see something you might not have noticed before.

Yahoo will offer 27,100,000 pages. In the top spot when I looked (an incredible feat when you think about it) is one of several listings that start with the words "search engine optimization". The first words in the description below the title are "search engine optimization." Go to the page, and the headline is "Search engine optimization". The copy beneath that reads: " Search Engine Optimization and as placement strategies are being applied by more and more webmasters, it is becoming more of a need than a luxury for competitive website owners to use effective search engine optimization, placement and ranking to remain competitive. Search engines couple with good optimization practices can provide your website with vast amounts of targeted traffic."

Even a machine should be able to recognize that the page is about search engine optimization. It will check to make sure the same phrase repeats an appropriate number of times, according to the length of the article, typically about once for every 100 words, or thereabouts. A page will lose points for too many or too few mentions of the keyword or phrase.

Keyword placement

The keyword should be in the page title (what you see in the search engine listing), its description (also seen in the search engine listing), its page heading and in the first 90 characters of the article. The closer it is to the beginning of each of these elements, the better it is from a search engine point of view.

Can't write, you say? Tell someone what it is you want to say. Give them a note to work from (you may find you have written your page right there, and all it that needs is a little editing). But if you truly can't write, get someone else to write your message for you. Alternatively, find a company to work with that will build a free website for you.