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Too many small businesses regard their website as the start and end of their web presence. Sure, they think about Search Engine Optimisation, and may even hire someone to optimise their pages. The trouble is, whatever your industry, the top Google listings are probably already crammed with search-optimised websites; so how do you get traffic to your site instead of theirs?

The answer is, think like a spider

I mean this metaphor in two senses:

1. Think like a search-engine spider the software that search engines use to crawl around the web, finding and indexing pages; and

2. Think in the shape of a spider, with your website as the body, and with arms (content) reaching out through blogs, article submission sites, and industry-specific websites that accept submitted content.

First point first: Think like a search-engine spider.

Search spiders need links

There's a great deal of debate about exactly how the major search engines index websites, but there is one thing nobody argues with: Search spiders need links.

Without links from one page others, spiders can't move. Without links to your pages, the spiders aren't going to find you. Conversely, the when there are plenty of links to your pages, the spiders will find you more often. (Okay, I know there will be some people reading this who are scared of spiders. You're probably thinking "I don't want the spiders to find me!" You can come out from under your desk now these are nice spiders).

As the spiders discover your pages over and over again through all the links to them, they will begin to see your website as an important place, and your search engine rank will reflect their opinion.

However, search spiders aren't stupid. They know that people use lots of tricks link farms, reciprocal link arrangements and so on to increase the number of links to their websites. Spiders place less value on these links. Sometimes they even rate them negatively.

So how do you get "good" links that will impress the spiders? That question brings me to my second point:

Think in the shape of a spider.

Reach out across the web. Get your content out beyond your website and draw potential customers to you. You can do this in several ways. Here are just a few:

First, there are lots of websites that spiders already see as important. In many cases, these sites have achieved importance by providing lots of high-quality content that encourages links from other sites. Many of these websites accept submitted content. They won't accept a blatant sales pitch,

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