Okay, you have your new ecommerce website designed and online. You have given the URL to all your friends and family. Now what? If your friends and family want to buy any product or service you sell, they already know where to find it. How can you direct new potential customers to your site?

While there are tons of terms for what to do next, some with ridiculous jargon and some as plain as garbage, the most common and accurate is “driving traffic.” What you want to do is drive traffic to your new website.

It goes without saying that there are numerous ways to do this. You can spend thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars on search advertising (AdWords, pay-per-click links, etc.) and / or display (animated pop-ups, print magazines, such as photos and banners).

While it would be inaccurate to say that this method never works, the truth is that most small business web operators who try it run out of money before investing in AdWords and other pay-per-click ads or cost-per-display ads. thousand pages. – Visitor Price Ads (CPM) are starting to pay off. The reason is simplicity itself. You will be charged for each person who clicks on your AdWords or visits a page that carries your banner. Since direct selling on most direct CPA (cost per action) ads like these is less than 1 percent, you’re paying a reward for 99 non-buyers to attract just one who becomes a customer.

You can sit for six months or six years and wait for a bolt of lightning in the form of a high return position from Google to hit your site. There is not much to say about this, except that it does not require any expense either in money or in effort. On the other hand, not many sites are struck by lightning in the average decade.

You can try to manipulate the “lightning bolt” scenario by hiring a search engine optimization expert, real or fake, to try and turn your site into such an irresistible sex object that Googlebot instantly falls in love with it.

Of all the options, this is usually the most expensive. It also offers both a reasonable chance of success and a huge potential for disaster. The problem is the nature of the search engine optimization business. No professional association licenses or memberships are required for someone to hang out as an SEO “expert”. That is why there are ten SEO wannabes for every SEO contender. It also doesn’t help the small business site operator that most true SEO experts work full time for Fortune 500 companies or limit their private practice to corporations with five- or six-figure web marketing budgets.

Inadvertently hiring a BS SEO guru, which is very, very easy to do, can result in only two things, one bad and the other bad suicide. The downside is that you don’t get anything for your money. The “I think I’ll hang” result is when your SEO advisor uses “black hat” tricks (also known as “search engine spam”) to try to trick their customers into ranking higher. .

All of the major search engines, particularly Google, have fully staffed and generously funded departments that do nothing but crawl, put up red flags and apply penalties to sites that use black hat techniques. Since penalties can range from hundreds of pages being returned in results to being completely removed from the search engine index, they are, in many cases, severe enough to put sites down. The possible gain of going to the black hat is never worth the risk.

Finally, you can do what the true experts, the webmasters whose sites appear on the first return pages of search engines for your important keywords, have been doing since the dawn of the Internet: create the most informative and easy-to-use sites. use. you can use the power of links to count the worlds, both the real world in which people live and the cyber world in which search engines work.

Links are the glue that holds the web together. When you Google something, the tens, hundreds, and millions of returns it offers are all links. When you press the “send” button in your email program, you are establishing a link between your computer and the recipient’s email server. When you click on “more information” or a similar element on any Internet page anywhere, you are invoking a link to another web page, possibly hundreds of sites and thousands of miles away, where that “information resides. “.

Reciprocal links, sometimes referred to as exchange links or two-way links, are generally the easiest to obtain and the most effective at generating traffic, particularly traffic that is already interested in your products or services, to your site. Relevant, high-quality reciprocal links acquired according to search engine guidelines and added to a site at a reasonable speed are also an extremely effective way to improve search engine rankings and performances.

In the simplest form, a relevant reciprocal link is like a word of mouth ad, webmaster A places a link to webmaster B’s site on his website (usually as one of several such links on a “page” of “links” or resources) and Webmaster B responds by putting a link to Webmaster A’s site on his site.

As an example, consider a bass fishing team site that exchanges links with 50 fishing centers and guides. The tackle shop is complementary, rather than competitive, with the resort sites and most customers who visit one are interested in the products offered by the other.

It’s a link created in heaven and one that search engines often award bonus points to. (Unlike irrelevant links (address store site to music store site), automatically collected links (links purchased from link farms or other bulk link providers) and paid links (exactly what name implies), which SEs treat as search engine spam.

For one (and unique) problem with the relevant manual editor-based linking strategies (i.e. a human, rather than a machine, initiates the linking process) is that they are incredibly labor-intensive and time-consuming. There are simply no quick ways to manually send link request emails, evaluate incoming link requests, add link categories, reformat link pages to place new links, and load reformatted pages on the web. The process can take 15 or more hours out of each of your workweeks.

The solution is a semi-automatic link management program that takes the heavy lifting off of you and leaves the decision making on who to link to and when is entirely up to you. A program like LinksManager, which invented the first true link management application about 12 years ago and owns a US patent on fully search engine friendly link management technology, can cut the entire process of acquiring new links and managing it. of databases of hundreds or thousands. of links by more than 90 percent.

Using a nominal price LinksManager link service and a free directory of potential link partners like LinkPartners.com, anyone, including you, can establish a vigorous, well-established, 100 percent “white hat” linking program in less than one week.