Thanks for your response. Please see my responses below...

<Roseb44170@aol.com> wrote in message
news:118uidvs871ml54@news.supernews.com...
>
> I don't understand why you're "wary" of search engine optimization.
> The latest article I have read is that 40% of website traffic comes
> from search engines.

I am wary of it because a lot of search engine optimization (SEO) are weasal
techniques (e.g., link farms). It is both unethical and going to come back
and bite its practioners. Google is working hard to not only build
algorithms to prevent SEO but to *penalize* these techniques.

> Simply put search engine optimization means optimizing/maximizing the
> chances of your site being listed when searchers are looking for
> information related to your website. There are a lot of interesting
> facts that I have found out - one being that people do a lot of online
> searching for businesses and services that are in their local area as
> opposed to them simply looking in their local yellow pages or local
> paper - what that means to me is that even though the Internet is far
> reaching to all over the world that one should not overlook their own
> local market. I have a website that lists businesses in my own local
> area and from my tracking service I have seen the kinds of businesses
> and services that they are looking for but more importantly I have seen
> the times that they have searched for this information - which is
> almost any time of the day that you can think of including the early
> morning and late at night.

True.

>
> There are many websites that get a huge amount of traffic without
> paying for the search engine optimization. How they accomplish this is
> to do the optimization themselves. The more time you spend on the
> Internet (and especially more so when you are working on your own
> pages) you will start to see a pattern of how traffic gets to your
> site. On the other hand if your site is not receiving a lot of traffic
> then you find out why. You find out where you rank in the search
> engines and why your ranking is where it is. You find out from the
> traffic that you do get why (and how) they got to your page(s). You
> use methods (and by methods I'm talking about low or no cost methods
> first) to increase your web traffic.

I have been using the Internet since 1992 so I think I have spent some time
on the Internet as well.

I am not opposed to bringing in more traffic, the question is how? How do I
do it without resorting to sort of artificial means?

Look, Google has very smart engineers. It is not my desire to try to
outsmart them. I am in this for the long haul. I'd be interested in hearing
specifically how to bring in more traffic.

> Another point that I have learned is that while increasing the number
> of visitors to your pages increases the chances of your product or
> service being sold you'll stand a better chance of selling more if you
> target your site to your target market.

Very true. And that is where things like Adwords could come in handy.

--
Robert Anderson