If you are doing any kind of business online, then your primary goal (after creating good, useful, relevant content) is to attract traffic to your website.  After all, you want people to visit your site, see your work, and either become a sales lead, a subscriber, or a new user.

Unfortunately, there are hundreds or thousands of other websites, blogs, or individual pages competing with you for the all important top slots on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs).  There are a lot of things you can do to make your site as search engine friendly as possible in order to attract visitors to your website.  There are also a lot of things you should not do lest you get banned from the first few pages of search engine results.

Here’s a list of 4 things you should do:

Get your website listed in internet directories. Directories like DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory have high rankings and give your site legitimacy.

Try to get subscriptions to your website. This way, when you publish a new article, your visitors are notified and have easy access to your site.  If you can collect email addresses, this is helpful too because you can get directly to your audience with a newsletter, for example.

Analyze your traffic. Google Analytics is a free program you can use to see what URLs on your site are the most popular, and what keywords people are searching that bring them to your site.  This will help you immensely in shaping your site so as to get the most traffic.

Create relationships with the owners of other websites similar to yours. If you can do this, then this can be very helpful.  This kind of promotion works well with blogs, but can also work well for an e-commerce website if you interest other webmasters with what you are doing.

4 Things you should not do:

Do not spam. If it feels like spamming, it probably is.

Don’t buy links. If you buy links from a link farm, chances are search engines will penalize you for trying to boost your rankings in this way.  Get legitimate links by creating good content that others will link to.  Also, comment on other websites and try to get a conversation going with others on the internet.

Don’t stuff keywords into your articles. You may be tempted to throw in your keyword phrases as many times as possible.  As soon as your content becomes unreadable because your keyword percentage is too high, that’s when you know you’ve used them too many times.

Don’t solicit links from any old website. Any link to your website is probably a good thing, but it is better to get links from higher ranked websites that are relevant to your site.  If you get links from sites in “bad neighborhoods,” this could hurt your site.  Don’t worry too much about this, but only do “link exchanges” if there is a legitimate reason.

Creating a successful website takes time, effort, and work.  If you do it right, you will reap the rewards.  Remember, the cream always rises, so if you do good work, you will be rewarded.

Good luck.  It’s tough out there.