There are 5 key ways to stimulate traffic and visitors to your web site:

Incoming link/URLs are extremely time consuming. An incoming link/URL must be programmed at the end of the link that it links to. In other words, it requires a link exchange. Although free incoming links are available, the results are very unpredictable.

Vendors will often provide free incoming links but they may be tied to quotas or exclusivity demands. The traffic productivity of an incoming link depends on the target market that you serve. And, quality varies from market to market. There are relevancy issues such as whether the page is linked from a highly trafficked site, has many incoming links, and/or is similar in content to the page that it is linked to.

Andrew Lehman Design offers links from our design portfolio, the Illinoisretail.com database, and more than 600 village & category directory pages that we've created.

The incoming links you automatically get from our directory pages have an immediate effect upon your traffic. Our restaurant page gets over 2000 visitors a week. The Evanston page, for example, draws over 3000 visitors a week. We have over 600 directory/index pages directing traffic to our clients (and paying advertisers). The reason our directory pages receive so many visitors is that they are coded narrowly around specific key word searches; therefore, they commonly receive top 10 rankings in their categories against 10's of thousands and even millions of competitors.

All your advertising and promotions should be accompanied by your www. If you are interested in banner ads or any other form of web advertising, we will create them for you. Our specialty is coding your site to be found by search engines and bringing you traffic through our directory pages.

Although there are over 3000 search engines, only 95% of the business in the US comes from 4 search engines (Google, AOL, Yahoo & MSN). Andrew Lehman design applies each page of your site to the main search engines.

Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, All The Web, Open Directory, Inktomi are search engines that we submit our client’s sites to. For other engines, we indirectly submit key words. Contact us to find out how we get into MSN, Inktomi, and Overture.

The beginning of 2002 commenced several profound changes in the way search engines do business. Among them, Yahoo requires a $299 fee per year to enter a site without any guarantee. Looksmart has evolved to an abusive pay-per-click device. Paying Inktomi makes it possible to get positioning in MSN and other devices.

We’ve been able to avoid charging our clients exorbitant fees. By getting prime positioning in the search engines through these and other devices for our directory pages, and then featuring our clients in those directories, we establish a steady stream of traffic.

A recent development, (October, 2002), Yahoo joined AOL using Google’s programming to run its rankings. This means that 3 out of the 4 foundation search devices are running on the same programming.

Many sites take longer than two months to gain entry.

The search engine rating game is subtle and complicated. Each search engines has different rating criteria. (Criteria that is constantly changing.) Our process is highly effective because our directory pages in a 1 or 2 word search, often attain a number 1 slot. Our ability to gain high positions depends on 1) our skill 2) and the number of sites with the same word or words competing for position. Search engines check six principles when deciding how high to rate a site.

Our ability to gain high ratings for your site depends on our creating your site to rate well in the five criteria within our immediate control. (The sixth criterion, the number of incoming links, is more subtle and expensive and takes longer to produce results.). Our web design is based on the fundamentals of increasing the ratings of your site.

We use a common denominator strategy when creating a web page. In other words, we design each page in your site to rank high in the search engines we apply to. Our design strategy works better in some search engines than others. We have been particularly successful in Google (which now includes AOL and Yahoo). In Google, we commonly attain top 10 positioning against millions of competing pages for our directory pages.

The five main search engine criteria that we code for are: