How to drive traffic to your home business!

Driving traffic to your Home Business website from the Search Engines is more of a process than an event. The first step is to get your pages ready for the Search Engines by checking your keywords and making sure you have a proper balance in the body of your document, and that these keywords are in your title tags as well. In fact the title tag may be the most important section of your html to insert your primary keywords or keyword phrases. make sure not to try and target more than a couple of different keywords or phrases. The meta tags have declined in importance recently, but you should nonetheless have your keywords there as well. When creating your Alt tags for your pictures, do not stuff too many keywords there as the Search Engines, at least some of them, seem to be getting wise to this tactic and may penalize your page. This process of getting your pages ready for the Search Engines is called Optimization, hence the initials SEO (Search Engine Optimazation). It is imperative to have your site correctly optimized before they are submitted to the major engines. Many people optimize each individual page of their site for a different engine. I suggest you focus on the biggest Search Engines such as Google and Msn Search. Some high profile Search Engines such as Altavista seem to be fading in importance fast so it may not be crucial to optimize any pages for such engines that only send a small amount of traffic anyway. After the Title tag the next most important part of your site for putting keyword rich text in the body of your document, or webpage. You might merely want the visitor to go to the home page or a certain page in your site after reading this page. In this particular instance, you will want to write the text in a way that the visitor is drawn to the page that you are targeting. In general, you should have 500-600 words in the body of your home page. A search engine optimization method that works well is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your important keyword. Find out the ratio of keywords are in the document by using the free sercive at keywordcount dot com and then make sure your page has a similiar ratio. Getting the correct keyword ratio is important because Some search engines will penalize your web site if it uses the same keyword over and over on their pages to get a high rank for that keyword. This tactic is known simply as "keyword stuffing" and you should be careful to keep your pages in the optimal range. When designing your Home Business web pages, be careful with java script and particularly flash. Google advises in the webmaster guidelines page of it's site: "If fancy features such as [...] Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.". Although the AllTheWeb Search Engine has been capable of to recognizing Flash files since around September of 2002, the engine is still not able to recognize text in the Flash movies. Whether the Search Engines index flash pages or not, you may decide not to use Flash on your web site anyway because many of your visitors may still use slow a dial-up connection and they will not enjoy waiting a couple of minutes only to see your company logo animated. In fact, they be upset you wasted their time for such a self-serving aim. And some people have simply never installed a flash player. If for some reason you are bent on using flash then provide links to alternate pages that have ample text and some keywords that the search engines can index Once you have optimized your pages properly, you are ready to begin promoting them. If you want you may submit your site by going to the "Add URL" pages of each engine you want to submit to. It is best to do this manually because each engine has it's own specific submission rules. Web directories almost always require a description and other information, while many search engines(such as Google) only require a URL or a URL and an e-mail address. Still others allow you to imput your own keywords. If you do not have the time to manually submit, there are some free automated submission sites around the internet, although they may not be quite so reliable, as some directories or engines may have blocked them over time to stop spammers who sometimes use these sevices. Addme and Submitit are popular. If you go to your favorite search engines and typen in "free url submission" a number of sites will pop up. While Google and Search Msn lead the pack in terms of important Search Engines, Yahoo, Open Directory and Looksmart may be the top directories.