When people look to submit their sites to the major search engines, there are some key mistakes that should be avoided for successful promotion.

Spam

The surefire way of getting your site blacklisted from the major search engines. Many people see creating thousands of cloaked or doorway pages with hidden text as the quick route to ranking success. It isn't.

Untargeted Traffic

It's one thing to generate lots of new traffic to your site, but is it the right traffic? If you're selling DVD's for example, you want potential buyers to visit, not people who are searching for pictures of a certain movie star. Best to make it clear in your meta information exactly what your site does, then you'll get the type of clientele you're after!

Single Keywords

Unless you're in some incredible niche marketplace where a single word can only be identified with your product with few competitors, single keywords aren't going to hit the bullseye in a traffic sense. Multiple word keyword phrases are the key to traffic success. Instead of going for "books", go for "thai recipe books" or whatever your target market is. You'll have far less competition for that keyword phrase than just a single word. Believe us, we've worked on a bookseller's site.

Poor Design

There's no way around this one. You can have the best rankings in the world, but if your site looks bad, you'll lose that traffic as soon as it arrives. Good, simple, clean design always wins - sloppy design and gimmicks don't!

I Don't Need Links

Oh yes you do. Links are crucial to the traffic building game. Without links to your site from others (if they're competitors, even better), good meta information won't be enough. Most search engines will rank your webpage according to its popularity with its peers. if a lot of sites link to yours, it must be good, so Google & Co. will boost your rating (link popularity algorithms). Read our dedicated article here.

Messy Meta Tags

It's worth spending a bit of time getting your meta tags in order - they tell search engines what your site's about, and act as a basic marketing tool to attract visitors to your site. Check the spelling and make them relevant and you'll be off to a flyer. Read our dedicated article here.

Stickiness

Page design and marketing are inseperable. Once you've attracted your visitors, your traffic building exercise has gone well and your site looks good, what are you offering which will encourage return visits? Regular site updates are very useful since your site will appear active and worth revisiting. The most successful sites we've worked on have been regularly updated. After all the effort you've gone to in gaining traffic, it's worth considering how to hang on to it.

Messy Code

After the search engine robots have visited your site, they'll see the meta information first, then they'll scan your page for the first chunk of relevant text. A large number of sites have cluttered code (Javascript usually) after the meta tags. This will not help your search engine ranking since the relevant text will be too far down the page. Try hiving the Javascript code (or similar) into another file and refer to it from the HTML.

Beware of Rogue "Experts"

Before handing your hard earned money over to "Site Submission Experts", be sure to find out exactly what you're getting. They may claim to be able to submit your site to "30,000 engines", but let's be honest, there's only a handful which create almost all the search traffic on the web, so you can submit yourself. Some firms claim to guarantee you a Top 20 ranked page - yes, if your search phrase is 8 words long. It's not that easy in reality. Reputable firms can help you optimize your pages, and advise you on how best to market your site to your target audience, so best to do some homework first.

Patience

Building traffic is an ongoing activity. After your initial hard work, you should check your pages on the engines and "tweak" them if the results aren't as you expected. Traffic is the oxygen of the Internet and your site is dead without it, so regularly give your code a tune-up and resubmit if necessary. Don't oversubmit though. If you look at your server logs, you'll see the major engine robots visiting on a regular basis, they'll pick up your changes soon enough if you can afford to wait a week or so.

All the best with your traffic building efforts!

About the author:
James Leckie is editor of http://www.bytestart.co.uk - the small business portal and http://www.trafficgeneration.com - the web promotion portal.