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Increase Web Traffic |
Secrets To Increasing Web Traffic
By Doug Williams - October 2005 It
is no accident that some web sites have thousand or even millions
of hits every day while others seem to be camouflaged with no visitors
clicking on their sites. In general, there are 3 major areas of Internet
marketing strategies.
Have
a product or service that is in demand. The more unique
and desirable, the better. If you're trying to sell something that
lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition
in two ways. It’s going to be a lot harder to get noticed
on search engines, and the competition is going to eat away at the
profits.
-
The more unique
and desirable, the better. If you're trying to sell something that
lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition
in two ways. It’s going to be a lot harder to get noticed
on search engines, and the competition is going to eat away at the
profits.
A website sells product by design. It presents the product / service,
builds trust, and then closes the sale. If people don't trust you,
they won't buy from you. It doesn't matter how many people you attract
to your website if they get turned off by an unattractive presentation
or a half-built website.
-
You can obtain
first page rankings on search pages without using tricks. If you
build highly optimized, search engine friendly web pages, you can
score well on several different keywords or keyword phrases. This
is called search engine
optimization.
-
Click thru rates have now dropped to just 0.3%. This
is not a cost effective traffic builder for your site. Banner ads
that are tied to keyword phrases are more effective.
-
The downside is that you work hard
to attract a targeted customer to your site and they end up leaving
before you can close the sale. The upside is that links pointing
back to your site improves your ranking with many search engines.
My suggestion is that if you want to add links, do this on a separate
links page.
This is one of the most disliked forms of internet
advertising. It violates one of the basic rules of the Internet - NEVER
SPAM. The bottom line is that email marketing doesn't work.
Free for all classified ad sites have popped up all
over the web. This is how they work: first you sign up and
receive your own classified ad site. Then you allow visitors to
post their ads for free. In exchange, you get to send them your
spam. The issue is that you are not dealing with targeted customers
and you end up with zero results.
Search engines are a great source for new customers. Existing customers
already know you and usually they usually don’t arrive thru
searches. Since visitors find you by entering in search terms, they
are new customers. These visitors are targeted…they create the
search that finds your keywords. Since they found you, they are motivated
and much more likely to buy. Properly targeted search engine traffic
results in sales that could have gone to your competitors…and
this goes to your bottom line.
This is a very important part of web page optimization. You need to
understand how your customer thinks. People who use a search engine
are looking for the product and its features. Remember, 3-4 word keyword
phrases attract buyers, 1-2 word keyword phrases attract browsers.
Create
a list of keyword based on common names, combining words into compound
words, common misspellings, looking at competitor key words. Stay
away from company name and brand names as keywords. Select keywords
based on recent actual search usages. This information is available
from the Internet.
In
picking the best traffic building keywords you will want to end-up
with 80% specific keywords or keyword phrases and 20% general keywords
/ phrases. Eliminate words that are unlikely to be used. Choose approximately
16 specific keywords / phrases and 4 general ones. Make sure that
the words cover your entire product line.
Search engine spiders are programs that follow links on web sites,
gathering data for search engine indexes. The spider, robot or crawler
goes to a web site and follows hyperlinks throughout the site. The
spider reads the meta tags on the web pages. Meta tags are tags that
appear in HTML at the top of each web page; these tags tell the spiders
what's on the page in a fashion that is easy for them to index. The
robot reads these tags and compares them to the content on the page.
The better the tags add up with the actual content of the page the
higher the spider will rank the page's TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORDS.
When the spider finds material in the tags that does not reflect the
actual content of the page, it will give the page a low ranking or
will not index the page at all.
The Meta Tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many
search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description
tag are what gets displayed.
-
All your most important key phrases should be in the TITLE tag.
Browsers only display the first few words of a title tag (whatever
fits into the title bar of the window). So while the first sentence
of your title tag should be readable by people the rest can be just
a list of key phrases.
should contain a short description
of the web page. You've already written one for the TITLE tag! So
just edit that to make it human readable (and perhaps a little shorter).
-
Enter your key phrases in the order you think
is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a key phrase,
and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times.
-
of your page should repeat and expand upon
everything in your title and description meta tags. You need to
have all those key phrases in it. However, since this is going to
be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind.
You clearly want to have your important key phrases on your page more
than once, because this is what gives the search engines a clue as
to what your page is really about. However, you don't want your key
phrases to appear too many times. This might make the search engines
think your page is a spam page trying to rank highly for a particular
phrase and will not list them.
Say that someone visits your page... but they can't! Their browser
blocks it, saying that it's "not appropriate". This is probably
because you haven't installed rating tags on your site. It's pretty
simple to do, and it means that a lot more people will be able to
access your site. See The Internet Content Rating Association at http://www.icra.org/for more information.
Pay-per-click is another way to increase the traffic to your website.
Pay-per-click providers are simply a search engine where you can bid
for the top positions for various search keywords.
Even
if you have done everything right and you have a perfectly optimized
web site for search engines and you have traffic flowing to your site,
you can quickly lose your potential customer with a poorly designed
website.
-
Have
useless or just plain bad content.
-
Make
your pages over 50K so the pages load real slow.
-
Disable
the back button so people can’t leave the site.
-
Place
blinking text and moving or spinning graphics to distract the reader
from the other really bad stuff on your site.
-
Don’t
proof read what you do and have plenty of spelling and grammar “misteaks”
-
Put
in music and make it really loud.
-
Make
your text unreadable by putting light blue printing over a medium
blue 3D wallpaper or similar background.
-
Put
your entire site on one long - long - long page.
-
Clutter
up your site and make it confusing so no one can figure out exactly
what you are up to.
-
Have
plenty of pointless graphics or clipart for no real reason.
| This article may be reprinted in its entirety for use in newsletters, websites, article archives and newspapers provided that this resource box is left intact and all links are left active.
Copyright October 2005
Doug Williams is the founder and president of Doug Williams and Associates, LLC. DWA is an Internet marketing and search engine optimization firm. DWA also operates a managed linking service “Don’t Worry About Links” at www.dwalink.com. Visit www.dougwilliams.com |
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