Just putting a site on the internet doesn't garuntee anyone will visit it. If you want people to visit your web site you will need to submit it to the major search engines and directories. Both providean important source of regular visitors to any web site.

After submitting your web site the search engines it may take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months for your site to be listed. Submitting todirectories is somewhat of a different process. When you submit your site to a web directory, your site is queued up for review by a site editor. This means a human being actually visits your site and determines whether or not it should be included in their index. Each directory has its own criteria for evaluating sites. In fact, getting into directories is a comination of luck and quality.

Submitting your site to search engines alone is not enough. You also need to work on building link popularity of your site. This factor has grown in importance in the last years. For Example, Google is hesitant to list a site that doesn't have at least one link from other domain indicating that the site is worth listing in its index. In addition, if your link popularity isn't high enough, you'll never achieve top rankings on many keywords.

The best thing you can do is to submit your site to majoy directories such as Yahoo! and Open Directory. Links from the major directories are the most "credentialising" links you can obtain, indicating to Google and other search engines that your site is worth listing. Unfortunately, getting listed in these directories is very difficult.

The simple solution is preciprocal link exchange. This is the most popular way of increasing link popularity : two web master simply agree to add a link to each other's site to their sites. A couple of well researched link exchanges will generate the link popularity required for a Google listing.

Set up your own links page on your site that will hold the link swaps you're going to arrange.

Go to Google and find a site that is ranked high for your main keyword. Most likely it has a links page with dozens, even hundreds, of reciprocal links. Copy these links along with their descriptions to your links page. Then, send a polite e-mail to web masters of these sites, introduce your site, tell them that you have already added a link to their sites from yours, and then ask them whether they would be kind enough to add a link to your site.

The response rate to these e-mails is low, especially if your site is new and doesn;t get alot of traffic. After a couple of weeks, remove the links to those sites which haven't responded and try to locate more sites with which to exchange links.

It's a good idea to submit all URL's that link to your site to search enginges, just to be sure that they know about them. Additionally, it allows search engines to find your site on their own.