"People don't buy online." -- Corey Rudl.

People who are new to Internet marketing often get that first site up and running, then sit back and relax with the sense of relief that comes from knowing that the hard work is all in the past. Then nobody shows up.

Getting set up on the Web is not like opening up a physical store. There are no curious shoppers walking by and wondering what's inside. People create sites based on this mistaken analogy every day, and wonder where all the shoppers are. They then bend over backwards or hire a designer to make their sites more attractive and inviting, as if this is the problem. The real problem is that Web traffic is not like sidewalk traffic. You have to find it, not the other way around.

Believe it or not, there are literally thousands of ways to get free traffic to your site: Banner ads, traffic exchanges, link exchanges, paper ads, ezine co-registration, solo ads, pay-per-click search engines, article submission, blogging, free-for-all directories, safelists, affiliate programs, and on and on. Pretty much everything you can pay for on the Internet has a free alternative (but you usually have to give something up).

The first and foremost is free traffic from the major search engines. That's because it's the only totally free way of getting traffic, in the sense that the only thing you need to do is the stuff you should have been doing anyway.

"But wait," you might say, "My site is better than almost all of the ones in my category, but I'm not getting any visitors from the major search engines." The reason is simple: Search engines are still pretty dumb and easily manipulated. You have to know what they want and give it to them.

You're probably all aware of the big 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These became popular for two main reasons:

* They were already popular Web portals to begin with, and then they added Web searching (in the case of Yahoo and MSN).

* They strive to find exactly what people are searching for (especially in the case of Google).

The latter point is the one you can control. Give people exactly what they're searching for in a way that Google understands, and you'll get visitors. What does Google understand?

* Content: The text in your pages, title, (sub)domain name, PDF documents, etc. tells Google the "theme" of your site. Do you have adult content, or phrases associated with illegal activity? If your content is too similar to some other page, yours is dumped in the "similar pages" bin.

* Links out: What other sites are you "recommending"? Google likes it when you only link to "quality" sites.

* Links in: Are other sites recommending yours? How many sites and how popular and on-topic are they? How are they describing your site?

* Links within: How is your site structured? Is it a directory, blog, catalog, forum? Are most of your pages content, or something else?

* Your site's age: Are you well-established or possibly just playing around?

* Content freshness: Have your pages been collecting dust for years or are you continuously updating their content?

There's more, but these are all things that you can control, or at least influence. Here are some things that search engines do not understand:

* Table layout. They can see everything in your table, but they look at it in the order it appears in the HTML document. What they see first is considered more important.

* Client-side content: Java and JavaScript run in your browser, and search engines don't attempt to simulate a browser.

* Images: Obviously a computer program will have trouble looking at a picture and figuring out what it means. Fortunately "alt" HTML tags can help describe what it's a picture of.

* Meaning: Though they might try, search engines don't know English or any other language not designed for computer programs to understand. They only know what phrases are related to others based on peoples' browsing habits, i.e. "also visited" or "also linked to" kinds of information.

Given how search engines work, it's not hard to think of things to do differently in order to attract visitors from search engines.

Appearance doesn't matter, content does. Make sure it contains keywords that people are actually searching for. Write lots of it, and often. To distinguish your site, try to find unique topics that other sites aren't writing about. Of course, be careful that your pages aren't so optimized that people hit the back button 5 seconds after getting to your site.

Be careful who you link to. If you have a country music site, don't link to a video game site. Don't link to porn or "warez" sites unless you're in that business. Try to get good sites to link to you, if they're related to you somehow (that the search engines understand), and have them link to different pages, with different text. You can do this yourself with forum posts and articles, and/or approach Webmasters directly with the attitude that "your readers might be interested in my site."

Be creative. You might be able to come up with a strategy that nobody else has thought of! Just be sure that it's based on how search engines work, and how they will continue to work in the forseeable future.