Once you have a site on the internet, you need to think about how you get people to come to it.
There are millions of of sites competing for the average web surfers attention out there, so you need to have a strategy for what will put you ahead of the pack.Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a systematic approach for making sure you rank as high as you can when people search for terms related to your site on the popular search engines.
Of course, given the current state of the search engine market, the most important of these is Google. For Google and other search engines, there are ways to make your site attractive. However, the days of "fooling" the search engines into rating your site highly are gone - the best approach is to provide high quality content, and encouoraging high-quality incoming links from established sites.
There aren't any magic recipes for this - you should be suspicious if anyone offers you any - but well-planned efforts will deliver results in the form of increased traffic. While it won't turn your site into a massive success overnight, SEO offers a route to a sustained growth in traffic to get you from a standing start to a prospering site in a reasonable length of time.
Hand-in-hand with SEO is the use of web analytics - this gives you an insight into how people are using your site, where they come from, how they arrive at your site, and what they look at when they get there. By understanding your customer, you get a better idea of how to present yourself.
