No doubt content is the king and is able to get you good traffic but what can content do if the content is not getting indexed in a search engine.

Site maps help you a lot in getting the content indexed by search engine. Apart from search engines, a site map is also helpful to your visitors in navigating your site, especially if the site is complex one.

As for me, I am personally against too much use of flash in the site for simple reason that content in flash does not get indexed in search engines. However you can use the power of site maps to still get those pages indexed in search engines.

You can also rank the pages on the basis of their importance through site maps. Site maps also help search engines to plan next visit to your site by telling them the frequency of their getting updated. This help search engines quickly find out the recently updated pages in your site.

Close analyzing of website statistics log and making suitable adjustments to site content and layout can have major impact on the site traffic and consequently on monetization of the site. A good hosting provider also ensures to install a special software installed on his server that offers you website log in easy to analyze format and giving all necessary details as as to how many people are visiting the website, where the visitors are coming from, where they are entering and exiting the website, the average number of page views per visit, and many more interesting facts.

Effective analyzing of these statistics can help you understand the effectiveness of your content and help you understand the demographic percentage of visitors, popular articles or content and on which search terms can help you get better traffic.

I must add that for a detailed analysis, quite often you might need additional software, other than the usual one provider by the hosting provider.

Submission to website directories is one of the easiest and effective ways to gain traffic and links. Common way for organization of most directories is aggregation of websites classified in different categories. These website directories are visited by people looking for specific information about sites related to that subject. Listing with such directories gives your site back links relevant to theme of your site.

What would you want, should a visitor enter your site through home page and then navigate to other areas or he enters directly on a landing page and gets his information. If a visitor lands on your home page, chances that we would reach the desired page of information he is looking for get diminished. This may due to poor site architecture, navigation or host of other reasons.

May be this scenario fits your site too! That you have a nice site, with regularly updated content, nice navigation, visitors who happen to be there, tend to like it, but you are unable to get swarm of traffic and monetize the site properly, not knowing what to do or how to fix and at the same time unable to hire some expert help, who comes at a heavy price.

Programming and keeping your site abreast with the latest trends and practices is an ongoing phenomenon. Problem in site optimization is that in case you are trying to cheat a search engine, it is detected in few days time and you are gone and in case you are on ethical route, you are competing with millions of others, who too are following the similar route as you are. Loosing out traffic from a major search engine is definite way to loss of real sales and conversions. In fact, I tend to lose most of my clients, when I insist that there is no shortcut to getting links on search engines over night and right path starts from first having lots of original content. However, this statement is also half truth. If you have a body, you need to flaunt it. If you have content, you need to get it indexed on search engines and you would agree that you would need to do it rather fast. I would deliberate on few measures that you need to do and rest assured you would have traffic you can dream of.
So while you are contemplating designing a new site or are frustrated with an old site that you are unable to get traffic for; follow the following suggestions, as derived from experience of many web masters as well as from Google’s guidelines to webmasters:

Talking about rich content is easier than achieving it. If you are a small time web master with not abundant resources at your disposal, you could not agree with me more. Today, you get a very discerning visitor who can not be easily fooled by below average content and he wont take a close a page and shift to another search. A problem that I have seen in many small but enterprising upcoming webmasters is that though they have novel ideas about the site and are technically great experts but unable to get the right content. Visiting various blogs, forum sites or thru elance. com sites you can know that for content writing of say 1000 words, minimum quote ranges from US to US . Such wide gap can not normally exist in a free market place but it does. What does this mean? While some gap could be there as charged by established and well rated writers, rest is definitely towards the quality of the content. A small or upcoming webmaster can not afford high rate of content development which leads to rather poor content which is either not keyword rich or is not unique or not of professional quality.
With in the l imitations of the resources, what best can be done to improve the content?

For a site to be fully indexed and in right category and to ensure that it is indexed on all related keywords is the foremost step to ensure high traffic. One of the simple and quite successful method for getting the site fully indexed by a search engine is to have a site map on the home page. It helps optimize the site by getting the interior p[ages of the site fully indexed. For a complex site dealing with multiproduct of options, it does help guiding a customer to know where a particular product or information is located. While you may have grouped a particular information in one category, your visitor might be expecting the same in another category. In the absence of it, a visitor may get lost locating particular information on your site. In this situation, a site map, which is essentially a html link to your internal pages, does help.

There are innumerable factors that can affect the search engines rankings. These factors vary from search engine to search engine as well as these vary from time to time as the search engines continue to improve upon their algorithm for ranking the sites. Out of the multiple factors that affect the search engine rankings, only few factors can be influenced by the webmaster that principally include the content management and the site structuring / programming etc. Few other factors that can be monitored are basically exploiting the loopholes in the search engines algorithms but such factors are short lived in their utility as the moment they are detected, they can adversely affect your rankings as well. As an example, while reciprocal link exchanges worked well for some time, today as the search engines have improved algo, this is looked down upon.

There can be no better pleasure for a webmaster than to see his growing and loyal customer base that keep returning. Returning customers automatically mean more traffic, more good will, more money, more sales or more of whatever the objective of your site is. But how to gain the trust of visitors? There are many sites on the net, some that come up to gain adsense arbitrage or some that aim to make instant gains for their worthless content and make money through google adsense or bidvertiser or the like.
Of course, as in my earlier articles, I emphasized that there is no alternative to original and authentic content, periodical updating, few other simple steps would help ensure the gain visitors trust and increase returning visitors