In order to get traffic to your new web site, you need to let the world know it exists.

Of course there are a number of ways to get visitors to your web site, such as placing ads in traditional media (newspapers, TV, magazines). You can also include your new web site address on your correspondance with customers such as invoices, newsletters and business cards.

As you know it's also important to be listed in search engines. It used to be that you needed to approach each search engine individually (Google, Altavista et al) to notify them of the existence of your site.

In many cases this is no longer possible and is generally unnecssary. The major search engines are likely to find you reasonably quickly anyway.

Google is king, for now

Although there are hundreds of search engines that purport to be useful, most traffic comes from the top few and even within these Google clearly has more users than other search engines at this time.

Consequently, your search efforts should probably concentrate on the major search engines and in particular Google.

If you know of or use any special-purpose search engines or directories that relate to your geographical area or industry, by all means you can add your pages to those too. In the case of these smaller search engines it can often speed things up to manually notify them of your site.

For example, Australian businesses should consider adding their sites to the indexes maintained by Anzwers (now part of Yahoo!) and WebWombat, two relatively popular Australian-specific search sites.

Last updated 07 Apr 2005

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