http://www.onlinestoreexchange.com/5freeways.html

If you’re like most new website owners, you wonder how to bring potential customers to your site without spending lots of money on expensive advertising. In order to help you, I’ve compiled another list of five methods that I have used to drastically increase traffic to my own site. In addition, there are two websites listed under each tip that will help you get started implementing these suggestions.

1.Win a web award: A number of webmasters give out awards to sites that go “extra mile” when designing their store. In addition to prestige, winning an award can generate interest and traffic from giving site. If you have a unique looking site, then you can be assured that a web award will bring a good deal of traffic. The two sites listed here are large directories of websites that give out awards: http://www.awardsites.com and http://www.uwsag.com

2.Become part of a webring: Many webmasters join up with similar websites and create what is called a webring. By combining forces with other complementary sites, receive traffic from people who are already interested in your product or service. Each participating site is given a code that they place at bottom of their webpage. Visitors navigate through sites by following buttons that are placed in webring code. To find out more about webrings, check out following sites: http://webring.com and http://ringsurf.com/

by Mario Sanchez

One of most frequent questions small business owners ask me is: I've designed my website, now, how do I get it on search engines?

Actually, having your site indexed by a search engine is not that difficult. However, making it rank high and appear in first results page is. Let's start with a brief explanation of how a search engine works:

Search engines store billions of pages in an archive called index. When a search engine conducts a search, it doesn't really search web: it searches index. Search engines add web pages to their index through work of a "search bot", a powerful software program that "crawls" web regularly, following links and adding to index all pages it finds.

So, step number one is to make search bots find your page. You can do this:

a) by directly submitting your page's URL to search engine, or b) by placing a link to your page on another page that is already in index.

There is strong evidence that method (b) is most effective.

Now, lets suppose that your page is already in search engine index. How do you make it rank high? The different attempts to answer that question have given birth to a whole new discipline called Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves following a series of techniques to increase relevance of your page for certain search terms or keywords.

You must decide in advance what are keywords you believe a user will type in search engine window to find your page. This is probably most important step in search engine optimization: if you pick keywords that nobody uses, or, to contrary, keywords that are too common (too competitive), your page will never be found.