Traffic is everything. As thousands of webmasters have already learned, you can have a catchy domain name and an impeccably designed website already on web. You can even have it indexed by search engines. However, even after all that, a website may only get a handful of visitors a day. After a few weeks of launching a website, you may catch up to fact that getting people to your site takes a lot more hard work than you expected. It will take many different approaches to make your website known, and you'll have to pull all stops: list your website in major directories, have it crawled by search engines, create a signature file for your emails, publish a free newsletter, exchange links, stamp your domain name in your business cards, stationary, and promotional material, advertise in traditional media, etc. But above all, it will take time, sometimes months or even years, before you're able to get significant traffic to your website, so prepare to be patient and don't give up.

Myth #2: We guarantee top placement with search engines When it comes to search engines, nobody can guarantee anything. The task of search engine optimization is a lot like trying to predict stock market. Just as no stockbroker can guarantee you a 100% return on your money (if he can, how come he still has to work?), no search engine optimization "expert" can guarantee you a top placement. Maybe he can position your website in a top spot for keywords that nobody uses, but that wouldn't be of any help, would it? All you can do to try to score big with search engines is to follow some basic guidelines, like putting your preferred keywords in your page title, repeat them often in your web page copy, and creating a site map link near top of page so that search engine can crawl all your pages. Other than basic things like that, only other strategy that can significantly improve your ranking is to get a lot of links to your site from authoritative pages related to your topic. That means more hard and time-consuming work, but you can only take out what you put in, don't you? So, if you want good results, stop listening to hype-meisters and get to work.

As promised, here's "juicier stuff".

Google has some advanced search options which come in quite handy, depending on what items you may be searching.

TITLE SEARCH: Allows you to search for pages and sites that have specific words or phrases in their title. For example:

intitle: "direct response marketing"

This search would only give you results of sites that have that particular phrase in their title.

SITE SEARCH: Gives you opportunity to search pages ONLY within a specific site or domain (or using "negative" results technique from Part One you can "exclude" results from a specific domain or site as well). For example:

"lead generation" site:direct-response-marketing.net

This search would only provide results for phrase "lead generation" from site direct-response-marketing.net

URL SEARCHES: Allows you to search for pages or sites that have a specific word or phrase in their URL. For example:

inurl: "direct marketing"

This search would only give you a list of sites that have exact phrase "direct marketing" in their URL.

To do a real power search, try combining a couple of above techniques into one search like:

intitle: "direct response marketing" -site: ebay.com

This search would give you results for your selected phrase, found in a tile, but not on ebay.com Neat, huh?