If you were to ask them, I would be willing to bet that most webmasters and Internet entrepreneurs would like to get more visitors (“traffic”) to their site. This is because, the more visitors that a web site gets, the more money it tends to earn. Furthermore, while it is true all visitors can have some value, perhaps the most valuable and most sought after, are those who arrive from search engine listings. Firstly, because they come free (unlike, for example, visitors from pay-per-click adverts such as Google AdWords). Secondly, these visitors can be extremely targeted – they have already decided what they are looking for, and expressed in by type a word or phrase into a search engine.

Activities designed to increase traffic from search engines thus form an important part of web site promotion. These activities span a number of different areas, but a common factor among of most of them is that they are intended to move a site higher up search engine rankings, as higher ranked sites tend to get more visitors. In any case, many search engine promotion activities are best done with the help of software, and these include:

1. Keyword Research – Basically finding out what search phrases or keywords to target in your promotion efforts.

2. Page Optimization – Modifying your web pages so that search engines will rate them more highly. In general, this involves making sure that your most important keywords occur in key HTML tags such as headers and titles (although not excessively repeated). You can use specialist programs for this, or simply read up on the subject and then use your normal HTML editing software.

3. Directory Submission – There are at least several hundred Internet directories which accept free submissions. Getting listed in these is an easy way to get some links (“backlinks”) to your site (which can help with search engine ranking). Directory submission software can accelerate this process by helping you get a lot of submissions done quickly.

4. Article Submission – Writing original articles and submitting them to article directories is a great way to get traffic, and also allows you to get lots of backlinks to your web site. Article submission software can help you easily submit each of your articles to hundreds of article directories.

5. Link Exchanging – Exchanging links with other sites is another way to get more traffic and links to your site. Programs such as OutRankSmart, SEO Elite or SEO Equalizer can take much of the pain out of this activity, helping you find link exchange partners, submitting for link exchanges, and helping your managing your links page.