By building up inbound links to your site and by using other, commonly known, methods of web site promotion and optimization, it is possible to produce a web site that performs well, or fairly well, with search engines. The key to success through is:
a) encouraging visitors to explore your web site (and thus avoid having a high bounce rate), and
b) encouraging visitors to come back to your site time and time again.
Your site must offer something that is interesting to visitors; if it doesn't, they will quickly move on to another site and they probably won't return to yours.
Social networking sites have cracked the problem really well: by building a community of users who regularly log on to a site. As more people join the community, you can very easily see how the number of daily visitors to a particular site can snowball.
Other web sites that perform very well without building a 'registered' community are news sites. Because their content changes on an hourly or daily basis, people know that the content on the site is always fresh. I know myself that if a news site is updated once a day, I'll probably visit once a day, whereas if it is updated several times a day, I'll probably visit it several times during the course of a day. You don't have to be a mathematician to work out which of the two sites is probably going to get the most traffic.
Someone said to me recently that a good optimization and promotion campaign might get your site a top 10 place in a major search engine, but it won't necessarily keep it there.
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