The site has been built, the content has been targeted with keywords and long tail phrases. We spend time commenting on blogs and submitting links to directories. So where’s the traffic?

Well, search engines and people have to find your website somehow. There are a few key ways that Internet users find websites.

– Direct links from advertising

– Searches in search engines

– Virtual word of mouth

The direct links from the advertisement are more or less what it sounds like. You pay to place your link or your ad or your link and ad in a highly visible place where people click on it and are directed to your website.

Searches in search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. You get it.

Virtual word of mouth. In recent years there has been an explosion of websites that do not use the traditional static information pages to generate and drive content. A new player has entered the realm of web information. You, the user.

He is no longer the all-knowing webmaster, the man behind the curtain, the one who pulls the strings on the Internet. There has been a revolution and the people have spoken, and the whole world is listening. User-driven content has become the focus of the web. Suddenly, the web has become a social place.

This is Web 2.0.

Social networks, social bookmarks, social search, social interaction.

Okay, so what does this mean to me? I mean, really, I just have a local garden store here in Seattle with a new little website that I hope will bring a little business my way.

Web 2.0 properties (websites) can be great sources of traffic. And they are also a great way to get your website indexed quickly by search engines.

What are some useful Web 2.0 sites?

There are literally thousands of user driven and interactive websites out there. And every day a hundred more appear. You may have heard of some of the biggest 2.0 sites out there: Stumbleupon, Digg, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Facebook, Technorati, Wikipedia, etc. Some of these sites are the most trafficked sites on the web. Millions of users use these sites on a daily basis.

There are two important things that each of these successful 2.0 sites have. First of all, they are free to use. And second, they encourage and thrive on social interaction.

Anyone can use these sites. They are free. And they are great ways to build backlinks to your website that have the potential to be seen and used by a large number of users.

Each of these sites promotes social interaction in a slightly different way. MySpace and Facebook encourage 21st century style social networking. They make it easy to find users and large groups of people with similar interests and contact or market to them quickly and efficiently.

Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Stumble upon (among hundreds of others) have users submit content (articles, web pages, videos, blog posts) and promote it in a variety of ways, often using a form of online voting (dig, thumbs up or down, bookmark) that drives more traffic the more users promote/vote for different sites.

Wikis are a great way to find user-generated information. On Wikipedia, anyone can log in and write or edit information on a million different topics. It is like a giant online encyclopedia that is continually generated, edited and written by readers and users themselves.

So how will these sites help my small business?

Use them, use them. Promote your site with them. Bookmark your content and articles. Send links to them. Add your link to a wiki. Create a gardening group on Facebook.

Remember, as more and more people come across your site, a certain percentage of them will promote your site by voting for your articles, bookmarking your page, joining your Facebook group. As this happens, more and more people will visit your site and more and more backlinks will be generated to your site by people other than yourself. As long as this happens, your web presence in search engines will continue to outperform your competitors.

The Internet is a marketing tool that most small businesses don’t understand how to use for marketing right now. By getting into the internet marketing game early, you gain such an advantage over your competition that it’s as if you ran the first half mile of a mile race before your opponent even started.