<b>Firstly, some basics.</b><br />Like it or loathe it, Google is the God of the internet. If you want people to visit your site, you’re going to have to do things the Google way. What’s the Google Way? Follow their Webmaster guidelines as closely as possible – these can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769<br /><br />There are guidelines on design and content, technical guidelines and quality guidelines. All three sets of guidelines need to be considered together – so for example, whilst it’s important to develop interesting content that users want to find (per the Google quality guidelines), their advice to “think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it” is telling you to make the pages keyword rich too (per the Google design and content guidelines) without keyword spamming.<br /><br />When you understand all of these, and you’re happy you’ve followed all the rules, you need to get to grips with the way Google ranks sites – an article on this can be found here: http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html<br /><br />If you’re confident with all of this, you’ll know that your two main goals are to obtain:<br /><br /><ul><li>Keyword rich quality content</li><li>Quality links to your site from other trusted websites</li></ul><br />So let’s think about how you can attain these goals.<br /><br /><b>1. Finding keywords</b><br />To do this, we can use a free tool that Google provide: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Type Google Keyword Tool into a search engine and decide on common words or phrases that you think describes your niche content (make sure you check the ‘use synonyms’ box to get the best variety of results)<br /><br />When you have some results, click on the “Approx Avg Search Volume” header to sort by the average monthly volume. You are going to take each of the search terms that look like good possible keywords and run a search on Google for them. You’re looking for keywords that don’t have much competition – so what you need to record is the number of matching pages. This appears on the right hand side of your search results, e.g ‘Results 1 – 10 of about 99 for thiskeywordterm. (0.55 seconds)’. You can also get an idea of the competition from the results under the column ‘Advertiser Competition’. Don’t forget to keep track of your results – either write them down or download the results in CSV format (this can be opened in Microsoft Excel or another similar spreadsheet program).<br /><br />When you have that information for a good handful of keywords you want to come up with a success potential ratio for each. It’s easy. Just divide the “Approx Avg Search Volume” by the number of pages for that keyword on Google. This is your success potential ratio. The higher the number, the better.<br /><br />Example A: Approx Avg Search Volume (6,500) / Matching Pages on Google (100,000) = .065 is your Success Potential Ratio<br /><br />Example B: Approx Avg Search Volume (9,750) / Matching Pages on Google (233,000) = .042 is your Success Potential Ratio<br /><br />Example B has a lot more searches performed, but has even more competition than A. This means the keyword from Example A is likely our best bet to target.<br /><br />When you’ve got your keywords, concentrate on making your content keyword rich for these. It will also help if you read some articles on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) so you know what factors Google and other search engines take into account. These are good articles:<br />http://www.seomoz.org/article/bg1<br />http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors<br /><br /><b>2. Set up Wordpress</b><br />Wordpress is a great tool for search engine friendly content. It’s very easy to use and update, and you don’t need to be a programmer to work it (although lots of programmers do use it because it’s a fast way to get websites live). Just type ‘Wordpress’ into Google to find the Wordpress site – if you’re not very web savvy, there’s a Dummies Book you can buy to help you create your site.<br /><br /><b>3. Create Content</b><br />You need to create your main pages – About / Contact Us / Your Order Page etc but you also need keyword rich content that will help search engines find your page.<br /><br />There are several ways you can go about doing this.<br /><br /><ul><li>Purchase 6-10 articles based on the keywords that you have chosen (2 keywords per article). This is a bit hit and miss because you need to find good writers. Essaybay (http://www.essaybay.com) is a good place to find writers for this – people bid on your work and you can read their reviews (and samples of their work). Academic Knowledge also have a good base of certified and tested freelance writers<li>Get another 6-10 articles from article sites. There’s a list of article sites below. Forget what you’ve been told about duplicate content. It’s okay to have some – as long as your entire site isn’t made up of these articles</li><li>Find 3-4 videos from youtube etc that are relevant to your service (obviously not advertising anyone else’s of course)</li><li>Publish 5 of your articles to start (begin with the original ones) then 1-2 every few days</li><br /><br /><b>4. Get Links</b><br />You need to get quality links to your website. You can do this by circulating your articles around the web and including links to your site both in the articles and underneath in your ‘signature’.<br /><br />Submit around half of the articles to:<br />1. EzineArticles<br />2. GoArticles<br /> 3. WebProNews<br /> 4. ArticleDashboard<br /> 5. SearchWarp<br /> 6. ArticleBase<br /> 7. Buzzle<br /> 8. ArticleCity<br /> <br />And the other half to:<br />9. IdeaMarketers<br />10. Site Reference<br />11. Article Alley<br />12. Web Source<br />13. Amazines<br />14. Submit Your Article<br />15. TheWhir<br />16. Excellent Guide<br />17. Directory Gold<br />18. Articles Factory<br />19. Content Desk<br /><br /><br />You then need to submit the site to around 20 web directories, and as many of the following as possible:<br />Ice Rocket<br />Kaboodle<br />Spicypage<br />Spotback<br />Wagg.it<br />Mister-wong<br />Ratemysite (.com and .net)<br />Ratemyeverything<br /><br /><br />Finally, try to adapt the articles as news articles and submit to<br />Zimbio<br />Digg<br />Humsurfer<br />Buzzle<br /><br /><br />5. You’re done – for now.<br /><br />Submit your site to Google (type ‘add URL’ into Google and you’ll get the right page) and the other top search engines. But don’t stop now. To make a success of your site, you need to repeat the process as often as you can – writing articles with links to your site and submitting them to the article directories frequently. There are far more article directories than I have listed – at least 50 good ones. If you submit two articles a week and get an average of about 200 people reading each of your articles on each directory per month, that’s 80,000 readers a month. If just 20% of readers click through to your website, that’s 16,000 visits a month. If you can spare the time to submit an article a day, you’re looking at over 50,000 visits a week sourced just from articles.<br /><br />Don’t forget that you’re going to need to track your results and a good way of doing this is Google’s webmaster tools. You can monitor external links to your page from that.