There is a huge industry promoting schemes to get visitors to your web site. Most of these schemes are either ineffective or outright fraudulent. One of the reasons for the existence of ineffective solutions is that the Internet and search engine ranking schemes have changed over time and many old schemes are not longer effective. Many of these promotion companies have not kept pace with the industry and are still trying to sell old ineffective solutions.

Although there are many common sense suggestions, there are not easy solutions. Common sense suggestions include;

• Make your web site attractive and easy to navigate
• Provide a good description of your services and products
• Invite your visitors back by providing regularly updated information
• Ensure that your pages have descriptive titles
• Provide keywords and a good description with meta tags

These suggestions alone will deliver very few visitors to your web site.

Register with search engines

• There are companies that provide an service for a fee where they will register you web site in thousands of search engines and directories
  • How many search engines really matter. It only takes a few minutes to register with Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Get listed in directories and web sites that already have good internet traffic

• Send messages to the authors of web sites and ask them to include a link to your web site
• Get listed in directories like www.eXpertGenealogy.com

Pay for traffic services

• Services like Google Adsense and Yahoo Marketing provide traffic to your site by providing ads where you pay a fee everytime someone click through to your web site. The ads appear on web sites or search engine results depending of keywords you select. You make bids starting at 10 cents per click for keywords or keyword combinations. If you don't bid high enough, other ads with higher bids will appear but yours will not. High bids appear nearer the top of the advertisement list.
• These services may require that you pay for the advertisements before they appear. They may also require you to set a minumum montly budget like $30/month.

Establish an affiliate program

• Offer to pay people a commission if they send paying customers to you
• This is easier said than done. There are software systems that trace click-throughs from affiliates links so that you can keep tract of which affiliate provided the link to you when a sale in completed.