You may have recently finished your first Las Vegas website. You may have spent a lot of time designing the layout, writing code, or creating other kinds of content for your site. However, without web traffic for your Las Vegas web site, your efforts may have been wasted.

What you should know is that the reason most websites get any traffic at all is because they are “crawled” by search engines. Being “crawled” refers to a search engine “spider” recognizing your web page. These spiders are computer programs that visit websites for the purpose of later indexing them so they can be added to particular search engines.

To be crawled by a search engine, you typically need to submit your website to that search engine. There are of course many different search engines out there. Ones you may have heard of are AltaVista, Ask.com, Dogpile, Excite, Go.com, HotBot, Info.com, Lycos, and WebCrawler.

With so many apparent choices, you may be wondering which search engines you should submit your website to. Don’t worry. It will not be necessary to submit your website to a hundred different search engines. This is because many search engines, such as Dogpile and WebCrawler, are actually “meta search engines.”

Meta search engines are search engines that are actually powered by results from multiple different search engines. WebCrawler for example draws its search results from Bing, Google, and Yahoo. Other search engines only draw from one source, but again may use a different search engine to power its search results.

Some years ago, there were still many search engines that used their own databases to draw search results from. However, a lot of once profitable online businesses, including search engines, have experienced economic hardships. The result of this has been that many search engine companies have been consolidated, and many previously independent search engines now simply act as facades that produce the same search results as the big three search engines.

The big three search engines today are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Bing is what Microsoft calls its search engine today. Past incarnations of Bing have included MSN Search, Live Search, and Windows Live Search. Since pretty much all of the supposed competition to these big three draw search engine results from their databases, these are the only three you really need to submit your website to.

Submitting your website to these three sites is very simple and completely free. All you really need to do is enter your website and a short description. Once submitted, it may take a while for your website to climb to a high search engine ranking for certain keywords. However, you will be well on your way to finally directing traffic to your website. Below are links to the website submission pages for Google, Yahoo, and Bing in that order.

http://www.google.com/addurl/

http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Reciprocal Link Exchange - Increase Traffic to Your Website

Implementing a Reciprocal Link Exchange program for your Las Vegas website can still be very beneficial to your website ranking and gaining traffic.

To start, a Reciprocal Link Campaign means placing links on other people’s websites to your and vice versa on what is usually called a “Links” page on a website. It is easier to acquire reciprocal links vs. just one-way links. If your Las Vegas website holds valuable information, it is likely other webmasters will accept a reciprocal link invitation to help cross-promote your website out on the internet. You display a link to their website and they’ll add a reciprocal link from their website back to yours.

Credibility is important. Try to not link to other websites that are poorly designed, have no valuable information or websites of an unrelated topic or an annoying link farm website. When Google spiders your website, it will assign a value to reciprocal links that it deems relevant. Websites containing similar keywords and content will be viewed as related and relevant web sites, and will thus count towards gaining credibility for your website.

Organize a Reciprocal Link Campaign for Your Website

Start by doing some research out on the internet to find websites that you may want to exchange links with. Try to pick complimentary (but not competitive) websites that have a google page rank equal to or higher than your website. Email the webmaster of the website you’d like to exchange links with and explain the benefits of exchanging links and see if they are open to the Link Exchange. 

To make it easier for the webmaster you’re requesting a reciprocal link from, include the actual piece of code they would need to insert on their website that would link back to yours. Make sure the actual link you provide has relevant keywords that would link back to your website. For example, if you are a Las Vegas florist, the link title you would provide to the webmaster might read “Las Vegas florist.” The keywords as part of the link help your google page ranking.

Remember, google still partially factors links back to your website into its search engine ranking criteria, so anything you can do to help your website’s ranking on google will help!

Resources

• Automatic Link Exchange Software - AutoLinksPro
• How to Get Reciprocal Links - AssociatePrograms.com
• Sites that swap and exchange reciprocal links - linkpartners.com
• Free Link Exchange Service - GotLinks.com

When looking into building a website in Las Vegas, or trying to further your website into something a bit more successful, finding ways to improve your search engine rankings is a very important concept. The first thing you should know to fully understand how to improve your search engine rankings is to know exactly what it is and how it is affected positively and negatively.

What are search engine rankings?

Search engine rankings are positive and negative marks given to your website by the search engine providers themselves, like google for example. A search engine ranking will either make your website higher or lower in search engine results pages - the difference from your website appearing on the first page or the hundreth.

What can I do to improve my search engine ranking?

Search engine rankings are influenced by many different concepts, strategies and tactics -  all built into how your website is structured, designed, and advertised, along with how all of the content is relevant into each other in the use of keywords and key phrases.

Some ways in which you can help improve your search engine ranking is to make sure your web address is simple, short, and supported by the most commonly used addresses such as dot com, which is the most popular on the internet today. If you are able to have relevant keywords as part of your title, that can help tremendously as well.

Another way to improve your ranking is to keep all content on your website relevant to either your website service, or the topics which your website focuses around, for example if your web name is dolphin, then dolphin should be a keyword which is used in all of your content to link relevancy of all web pages to your website. Even advertising pages which are not on your website should also still be relevant to the given topic.

When using keywords you need to watch your density of usage, you do not want to use too many or too few. Too many can get your website black listed as spam by a search engine, while too few will make your website hard to find on a search.

The best way to increase your search engine ranking in a short amount of time to gain maximum traffic, would be to invest some money into your website and hire a professional Las Vegas web design company. A professional web design company knows all the tricks to maximizing page ranking and getting your site to the top of the search engine using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Improving Search Engine Rankings for Your Las Vegas Website

For many, the traffic to and from a website is the most important part of the internet marketing process for your Las Vegas web site. Without visitors and traffic, many sites cannot flourish and the information on them is then meaningless. To increase the number of visitors and traffic to a website, many businesses turn to search engines, hoping that if their site appears more often or closer to the top in a search, that the traffic will increase. 

One way of doing this is referred to as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This process attempts to improve visitor rates “naturally” by alter the content and presentation of information on the site itself, hoping to increase how many keywords the site falls under in a search. For example, if a site were to be originally focused on horse breeding, this site would probably only appear in searches for that specific keyword: horse breeding. Applying SEO, the site host would add articles concerning horse breeds, care and up keeping of horses, feed options, etc. All of these all still fall under the category of horse breeding, but the site will now appear in a number of other searches with different keywords separate from just horse breeding. Unfortunately, many sites use SEO to draw people into spam sites, referred to in the industry at “black hat SEO”. These sites attempt to fall into as many keyword categories as possible, so as to appear as options in as many searches as possible and be seen by as many people as possible. While not necessarily illegal, this use of SEO is considered against internet ethics; it is, however, a good way of explaining and understanding the SEO process.

Another option of optimizing the number of visitors to a site is SEM, or search engine marketing. Unlike SEO, SEM does not alter the actually content of the page. Rather, it places paid advertisements for the site on search engines. Put any keyword you can think of into Google Search and hit enter. On the right side of the page at least five little advertisements will appear, each with at least on of the words from your keyword search in it, even if it doesn’t make any sense. This is an application of SEM. By paying Google to host their site as an ad, websites increase their visibility and, hopefully, their visitor rate.

Your website can be a valuable sales tool and lead generation tool, especially in a tough economy. I’ve compiled several ways in order for you to increase website traffic to your Las Vegas website.

• Ensure META tags (title, description, and keywords) are as targeted an accurate as possible. These are tags that are in the back end of the html code.
• Ensure you are listed on the major search engines - make sure you are listed on the Top 10 Search Engines
• Make sure your content is up-to-date, accurate and gives a visitor a reason to return - keep a clear call-to-action on the home page.
• Clearly define the benefit that your products and services present to your potential customer.
• Focus on your content and make sure you write about one topic per page, don’t cram several topics on the same page.
• Ensure your website has a links and/or resources page. Helpful links are valuable to visitors and external links to big website increase your search engine ranking as well.
• Social Networking, sign up for free social networking websites, create a rich profile, add friends and communicate what you are up to… friends and colleagues can be your best advocates.

In addition to the above, check out some great articles and resources on increasing website traffic:

• How to Increase Website Traffic - wikihow.com
• Increase Traffic to Your Website - Web Traffic 101 -seologic.com

Okay, so your Las Vegas company or business has a website, that’s a great first start. In addition to a professional website design with good content, your website needs to rank or appear in search engine results like google.

Natural organic search engine rankings for your website bring your website listing to the first few pages of a google search. Organic rankings are the ranking google pulls when you do a search. They are not the paid or sponsored listings or links.

Here’s a visual to help (it’s my company Perkolate coming up #1 on a search for “las vegas marketing company”):

So, how can you improve the organic ranking for your website?

• Have a well written website with a decent amount of content, a couple of hundred words on each page if possible.
• Optimize all META tags on your web pages (title tag, keyword tag and description tag)
• Link to other websites, could be partners of your business, helpful links, articles, community links, etc.
• Have links going between your website pages that are rich in keywords and key phrases.
• Purchase your domain name for several years (tells search engines you’ll be around for awhile!)
• Have a professional SEO company in Las Vegas perform Search Engine Optimization services on your website.
• Consider adding a blog to your website (another great way to get more links and traffic to your website).
• Add your website to the google directory (and all other top 10 search engines)
• Keep your website up to date - search engines like fresh content.