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Have interesting, useful, and fresh content on your website to make it popular. Many people measure a website's success by the number of visitors it gets, so ask yourself: why would people come to my website? Do I offer them interesting information that relates to my products or services? If not, why would they come? If they were attracted only by stylish design, will they come back?

Add new content to your pages often, giving people a reason to visit regularly. Fresh content builds trust in the information you provide. If you haven't updated for a long tome, people might think that you have gone out of business, or forgot about keeping your customers updated, or don't have the capacity to update your website with the latest information. Also regularly updated content (even small changes that you can do on your calendar or blog pages will bring web-spiders back more often, which leads to faster indexing with the search engines.

Optimize your content for popular keyword search combinations that are relevant to your business. Learn which keywords customers are likely to use to find you. Use these keywords in headers, menus, links, pictures, and texts. Don't do it just for the sake of search engine optimization. Keep the content readable, interesting to humans. Try to create content that others would like to link to naturally.

Links

The ability to get links to your website, in addition to interesting content, is one of the most critical factors of how good your website will rank in the search engines. When exchanging links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Collect incoming links to your website from websites with similar orientation.

WARNING: You should never link to, or add links from, link farms (these are collections of usually unrelated websites that are hyperlinked to one another through some automated service). Link farms are considered as spam sites in the eyes of the search engines.

Photos

Your digital camera can be great marketing tool. Take some nice photos of your area and post them with detailed descriptions on your website.

Take some pictures of important events, post them on Events section on your site and tell narratives about why they are interesting and important. Photos of local celebrities will drive traffic to your website.

Signature

When writing emails or doing instant messaging, tell people of who you are and what you do through your signature. Include your name, clickable website address, perhaps a slogan or a mission statement, and contact info in the signature. Many web forums allow poster to have links in signatures or personal profile links. When you provide useful contributions some visitors will follow your links and potentially come to your website and buy your products.

Social Networking

You've probably heard about social networks such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, etc. Many social networking websites allow creating your profile for free. If you have the time to participate in such social networks - do it. It increases your visibility.

Comment on other blogs and messages. If your comments are useful and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other blog readers become aware of your website. They may start reading it and, hopefully, linking to it. Don't worry about links - worry about building positive relationships with people.

It is relatively easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

If you run a fairly reputable company or organization, consider creating a Wikipedia page about it or a page in topic specific wikis.

There is a lot more to website marketing, and there are always more details and opportunities when looking at each an individual website. However, these simple tips should help a website to improve its rankings.