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

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