Weve been looking at how you can use the web to significantly boost the profits you can make from your local business.

Today well look at how the web really works and how you can use this knowledge to beat your competitors, steal their customers, and massively boost your saleswithout them having a clue how youre doing it.

Many people put up a website that is nothing more than a brochure with an order button.

The fact is, most people search the Internet looking for free information, not usually for something to buy. Your mission is to give them that content and then recommend additional, more appropriate products or services to fulfill their wants and needs.

So, for most local business owners, a successful website is one that contains lot of content.

On the web, content is king.

Millions of searches are done every day by people looking for information. I read in the Australian Financial Review that just one search engine, Google, handles up to 3000 searches per second!

People all over the world, and just around the corner, are looking for information on all sorts of things.

The trouble is, most websites are nothing more than a few pages of rubbish cobbled together, filled with banner ads and flashing objects and text that are an affront to your senses, or sales letters trying to flog you something.

Or another type of site will be just pages stacked with keywords whose only function is to re-direct anyone who happens to click on the listing to some other page, that is itself just a sales letter trying to sell some piece of overpriced junk.

This frustrates the search engine companies, whose main goal is to provide relevant search results to their customers. When you build a website that has high quality content, it enhances the search engines standing and makes them look good for including your web pages in it's listings.

Your high quality pages gradually push their way to the top of the search engine rankings, where more and more people find you, which in turn means more visitors to your site.

So, decide on a theme related to your Business

then simply build a website around that theme

Create pages of relevant content that give your readers information about topics related to that theme. The more pages the better. Each page needs to tie in with all of the others to a common theme so that the entire site follows logically along the same path.

The search engine spiders will find the site, read through each page, and decide on the overall theme.

If all of the pages and articles are grouped around the same theme, your pages will be considered highly relevant to search queries made by web surfers looking for information on that topic.

The more relevant content you have, the higher your site will rank in the search engines. Eventually, you will start to receive some traffic from the major search engines. It can take several months to see your first visitors, so while they are on their way, keep building more and more content pages.

If you aren't a great writer, that's no problem. You can find great articles FREE on the web that people have written and made available for you to use on your website.

There are many places you can find Free articles - just type 'free website content (followed by your topic)' or 'free ezine articles (followed by your topic)' into a search engine like Google and you will find hundreds or thousands of matches.

Then, simply write an introduction to the article, insert the article below it, then write a couple of paragraphs at the end showing how the article ties in with your Business or theme, and offering a product or service that is related to the article.

Simple...but be careful not to use articles that direct your visitors away to websites of your direct competitors - always use articles that offer great content but aren't promoting products or services that will take sales away from your Business.

Pretty soon, your visitor traffic snowballs until you reach the second stage -

Visitors arriving by the hundreds...then thousands per day

As traffic builds, you continue creating more and more quality pages tightly focused around the same theme. Visitor numbers grow and many of them, when they read your great, informative content, will continue to tell their friends about your site.

Over a period of several months, your traffic numbers should continue growing if you have done all the right things when building your website - optimized your pages, submitted them correctly to the search engines, kept building pages of quality content.

Once your traffic is flowing and your visitors are reading your information and returning regularly to see what's new, it's time for the next stage...

Pre-selling - giving your visitor the information they are seeking. To learn all about how to Pre-sell your website visitors on doing business with you instead of your competitors, check out part 4 of this series.