Don't be daunted. Armed with the right knowledge & understanding, implementation, drive, and continued learning, the internet is the most accessible way for the "little guy" to give the "big guy" a run for their money.
I back up what Jeffrey says - in general, with Search Engines, there are a variety of way to boost your visitors. However, most of the are paid methods, such as ads, Pay-per-clicks, paid search engine marketing, etc.
The one "free" way is to research and implement what is called "Organic" Search Engine Optimization. This means that your site has relevant information about the topic the searcher is looking for.
To give you an example of all of the above...
Have you ever heard of Hallmark? Yes, I believe you have - so has most everyone - it's a well-built and established brand.
Now...Go to Google and enter in "Greeting Cards". Who comes up first on the list of results? Should be Hallmark, right? Well, it's not. It's a fairly small outfit. Hallmark shows up later, with a horrible landing page url that lands you deep into their nest of content management and takes forever to load - not a great thing for such a strong brand.
The point is that the little guys understand what they are doing when it comes to search engine optimization (I can not speak for the rest of their practices).
There are many different things to consider inside and outside of SEO, but in general all you have to do is this:
Identify who is in your industry as a key competitor. By this I mean who is top at what you are trying to achieve. If it's at being at the top of search results for a certain page on your site, then find the ones that are currently showing up top instead.
Investigate & Study what they are doing that makes them have this edge and replicate it.
Study it further and then do it better than they do. Sound simple? It is. Of course, there are a lot of things to take into consideration, but in general the key is to be a clever A+ student
Do your homework, do your outside reading and research, apply what you've learned, see the results and refine - all the while learning more and more.
Hope that helps.
Sincerely,
Craig S. Kiessling
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Build a Better Net
CSKnet
www.csknet.net
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