What is best way to draw traffic to your website?

Our survey said...

Search Engines 53 Article Distribution 30 Ad Swaps / Links at other sites 14 Banner Advertising 8 Signature Files 5

Ironically, it seems possible that we could have selected a different set of people and answer for search engines would have been zero. At least, a web designer was telling me that this morning.

One of his web design / web hosting clients has hired my company to help with building her website traffic. One of changes we had suggested was to offer her visitors both a Frame and a No-Frame site, with express intent of using No-Frame site to capture spider search engine traffic with her already keyword-rich website.

Our client currently has a Framed site which she likes appearance of. Otherwise, we would have suggested to only use a No-Frame site.

At every step of way, her web host has been causing us great difficulty in process, because as he said, "Search engines do not bring any traffic to a website." Even when his client told him to make change, he refused because "it is a waste of time." Since he holds username/password to site and will not allow me access or his client direct access, we must deal with him. (I have never met a web host who ran his business like this either... I am helping his client to search for an alternative hosts now.)

I talked to him on phone this afternoon, and he told me, "You know that statistics show that search engines do not generate much traffic to a website."

I don't know whose statistics this man is looking at!

I suggested to him "No, I don't know that. I run more than a dozen domains and all of my domains generate a considerable amount of search engine traffic. My original site knocks down over 50% of its visitors from search engine traffic, and site serves thousands of visitors every month." I love using this website as an example because I have not promoted it hardly at all since August of 2000.

When I began this particular site, it was intended as a computer technical support destination. Around beginning of 2000, I began making a shift in my own web activities. As such, this site is now really a potpourri of activity, though more than 60% of site remains under umbrella of computer technical support. Due to fact that most of my computer support newsletter exists in archives of website, this site is very keyword rich!

In order to drive my point home about effectiveness of search engines on web, I have taken a step that most people would consider crazy. I am making public three and a half months worth of my site's statistics. I can afford to do this because this site, WindstormComputing.com, is not my primary bread and butter anymore.

Be forewarned, these pages are big, so if you have a slow machine, you probably don't want to participate in this exercise.

The first page I will be showing you is for first eleven days of May, 2001. In those first eleven days, there have been 458 visitors to my website from search engines. In all, site has been visited by 682 people, and they have looked at a total of 1855 pages. Of those who came calling, 67% of them came from search engines.

Most of our search engine "traffic" comes from 12 MAJOR SEARCH ENGINES - we estimate about 95%. In listing our various web sites, we only concentrate on major (12 or so search engines) and directories, like Open Directory, who supply their database to many of big SE's (see I'm learning "tech/geek speak" terminology already).

I've found that I check our listings in search engines every two months or so and do resubmit - just to MAJOR search engines. Though I don't try it with Alta Vista and especially Yahoo (as we are already high up there with our creative writing courses). I don't dare risk them chucking us out, though I don't think they will! We've had some difficulty with HotBot and Lycos (especially) and Open Directory in getting listed, so I do re-submit from time to time and they then seem to get listed. Alta Vista seems to take a while- about 6 weeks. Believe Lycos is "winding down" in listing sites incidentally and Infoseek takes a while also. Sorry too late, they have become yet another "dot.bomb" and have ceased operating. Things move very fast in cyberspace!

So suggest checking your listings occasionally and resubmit- ting (INDIVIDUALLY). I don't think any of major search engines see that as spam.