The majority of your traffic and new customers should be coming from the search engines. Most web hosting companies provide you with a free stats package. This will show you how many people come to your web site, what browser they are using, what search engine they came from and the search words they typed to find you. This is valuable information that you need to know. You can't improve something if you don't know where the problem is. A number one listing in MSN may not bring as much traffic as a number 20 ranking in Google.

Search engines read your page title, meta tags, alt text, and page content to determine how to rank your page. If your page doesn't rank well changes need to be made to improve your ranking. This is the easy part. The hard part can be trying to figure out what people will type in the search engine. These are the keyword phrases that need to be on your page. Each page of your site can be coded for different search terms. After your page is listed in the engines these terms should be reviewed.

I have seen many web sites that can only be found by typing the company name in the search engine. Obviously new customers do not know your company name and you are not going to receive much traffic this way. The pages need to be coded for specific keyword search terms. Ask your web designer if they are optimizing your pages for top search engine placement. Most web design companies do not include this service as part of the web design process. Many companies specialize in search engine optimization only and prices start at around $1500.00 per site and can be is much as $1500.00 per month. It's much cheaper if your designer knows how to do this for you when they first build the web site.

Look at the customer sites designed by the web design company you plan to hire. All the way at the top of your browser window, above the back button you will see the title text for the web page. If you don't see keyword search terms here it is a dead give away that the site was not optimized for search engines. Often all you see is the company name. There are many other things to look for but this is the best place to start as it is one of the most important and easy ways to increase your search engine ranking.

All of the above is called on page optimization. It used to be all you needed to get to the top of the engines. Though most of the above information is still important, it is no longer enough to get you a top listing. The search engines don't want webmasters to have control over search rankings. They now take into account many off page factors. One thing they began to do is count how many other web sites link to your site. A link from another site was like a vote, if other web sites like yours the search engines thought the sites with the most links to it must be the best. When people found out about this they started exchanging links with other web sites. Sites with high page rank started selling links to other web sites. (do a search on ebay for page rank) Needless to say this form of ranking soon became meaningless. The search engines had to change their algorithm, and they keep changing it. What is known as the Florida update back in 2003 is when things really started to change. Now it is not only important that you have links to your site, it is important who is doing the linking and if links to your site appear too fast that can seem unnatural and count against you. Google takes into account how long your domain is registered for. How long have you been around, how long will you be around. You may have heard of the Google sandbox filter. This filter keeps new sites from ranking well until they have been around awhile. All these algo changes are an effort to keep spam out of the search index. If webmasters have no control, then they can't spam the engines. Unfortunately many good sites are taken down with the bad. You may rank on the first page search results one month and the next month your site is nowhere to be found. Break the rules and you can be banished from the search engine permanently. Do a search for Traffic Power in Google and see what happened to their customers. This company did get their clients top rankings in Google, but eventually they got caught and were banned from the index.

Read the Google quality guidelines to find out what can cause your site to be removed from the index. Matt Cutts a Google engineer who attends search engine conferences and talks with webmasters knows the difference between SEO and spam. Matt now has a blog where you can find out the latest information on what is up with Google.

What used to be called Search Engine Optimization is now called Search Engine Marketing.

The most cost effective way to bring instant traffic to a new web site is with Google Adwords. This is called PPC advertising. (pay per click) Your ad runs on the Google search results and you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad.

$5.00 is all it costs to set up a Google Adwords account. You create the ads, you choose what days and times you want the ads to run and you choose how much you want to pay per click. You can set a daily budget to easily control your spending.