If you are about to get a website designed the first question and most important question you need to answer is…

What Do You Want Your Website To Achieve For You?

Maybe you want to use your site

• as an online brochure
• to create a professional and credible image
• to sell products directly
• to take orders
• to attract new potential customers to contact you for information
• to provide information
• to generate the email addresses of subscribers to your newsletters and free reports.

 

Whatever it is that you want to achieve, it will require you to drive traffic to your site to get it.

How To Drive Traffic To Your Site

Tell Your Customers About Your Website

Publish your website on everything that you use to promote your business. Your business card, your brochure, your sales letters, your compliment slips, your company magazines, your invoices, your advertising, your vehicle livery, as part of your window display. It is useful if the website name is both easy to remember and contains keywords in its title.

Give Your Customers A Good Reason To Go To Your Website

Give your customers a good reason to go to your website. Invite them there by offering something of value when they get there.

• An article.
• Free information.
• Book a free consultation.
• A free trial or test.
• An online demonstration or presentation.
• A competition linked to information on your website.

 

Promote these incentives in your daily communication with existing and potential customers.

Increase Your Link Popularity

Link popularity is the total number of websites that link to your site. Good quality link popularity can dramatically increase traffic to your website. Well placed links are an excellent source of consistent and targeted traffic. They can also even generate additional search engine traffic to your site.

Increasing the number of quality relevant sites which link to your site can actually improve your search engine rankings.

What Is A Good Quality Link?

A good quality link is another organisation that already has achieved search engine popularity and is relevant to your business. A link is when your website address appears on another business site. They can be achieved in a number of ways.

• Joining online directories for your specific industry niche.
• Joining networking directories.
• Banner advertising on relevant sites.
• Article writing for other sites.
• Reciprocal links with partners and host relationships.
• Banner advertising.

How Do You Know Who To Link To?

The trick is to run a test search and find your most popular competitors. Go to www.linkpopularity.com and type their details into the free search box. You can find out how many links they have and who those links are. This will give you a head start. Research all the links they have and choose the ones that you think will work for you. You can also use this tool to find out who is linked to your site already. It will allow you to research Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

Search engine optimisation means making the most of your website content to enable you to rank highly in search engines. The higher your rank the more likely people are to find you when they search for the products or services you offer.

This is a highly skilled and time consuming process which is why many companies recruit a specialist website marketer to work with them over time to build up and fine tune their approach.

How Do The Search Engines Rank Your Website?

It depends on a number of factors.

• How many sites link to yours.
• How many pages your site has.
• The words in your website name.
• Keywords.
• Words in bold.
• Words in URL.
• Having more than 300 words on your home page.
• Keyword density.
• Google page ranking.

 

If you are prepared to go through a steep learning curve there are things that you can do yourself.

Find Out What Your Keywords Are

Keywords are the terms and phrases you would naturally associate with whatever you sell. Ask yourself if you were searching for your products and services using a search engine what would you type in the box.

Brainstorm all the words that you think a prospective customer/visitor would enter into the search engines. Ask your customers, friends and family what they would enter. You can put yourself into the position of someone searching for your product and service. How do they think and what would they be most likely to put into a search engine?

The Overture search assistant tool is one of the most useful resources I have found for exploring how many searches in the last month were made on particular key words. Here is the link for this free tool and some basic steps to take: www.overture.com

• Choose your country.
• Go to the basics of search marketing.
• Go to right tool for the job.
• Click on to keywords which will take you to the keyword assistant. You can type in all the keyword combinations on your list and find out how many times they were searched for in the last month.
• Look out for the search term suggestion tool.

 

You can also:

• include your keywords in your website title
• include your keywords in your copy
• repeat in different ways on each page on your site.