Driving Quality Traffic to Your Website
Having a great website is only the first stage of developing an effective online marketing strategy. a well designed and well structured website which is quick to upload and easy to navigate is a good start. If the website has content which has been thought through to meet the objectives of the online presence that is another big step forward. However the website will always be worthless unless it has a reasonable volume of quality traffic. By quality traffic I mean visitors to the webiste who arrived on the website directly and purposefully and may at least consider purchasing the goods and services the website or company that owns the website sells. Of course some websites do not seek to sell directly but the same principal exists, visitors must have an interest in what the website is about to be of any real value.
To drive this traffic to the website there are two forms of marketing that can be utilised, online marketing and search engine optimisation. Online marketing is the use of email, banner advertising or directory listings and has the objective of raising awareness of a url and a website and hence driving traffic to the site. Search engine optimisation is concerned with elements of the design, copywriting and functionality of the website itself that will assist in obtaining a high position on the search engines for the website.
The very first thing is to consider carefully is your domain name for the website. Often businesses will select a url which is the same or similar to that of the company, more often that not that is fine. However if the business is specifically an online business it is more effective to select either a term which people searching for your type of products or services will use such as ‘buysunglassesonline’ or alternatively to develop a memorable brand name such as Google, Ebay or in our case e-Moonlighting. Both of these approaches will make it easier for people to locate your website. You then must check for availability of domain names and decide which of the available options to select, .com will typically be better for international services and domains such as .co.uk will be better for nationally targeted websites.
Meta titles remain an element in SEO but seem to have little effect with Google now, however it is still worth adding them to your website keywords. You must complete the page titles for each page as these page titles assist the search engines to locate your website, the page title should include the keyword for the page. a website SEO company will be able to help you with this. For page content, the copy should include the keyword several times if possible but do not allow keyword density to have a negative impact on the flow of the copy or content.
Make sure that the content on your website is high quality and relevant to your target audience with well written copy. Update the content of your website regularly, the search engines prefer websites with regular new content. This update could be in the form of a latest news page or a blogs. Include a series of articles about your services industry or other relevant and interesting content. Place up to four internal links from the keyword in each article to a relevant page on your website. Have an XML website map added to your website, this will help the search engines find your pages. For Google particularly it helps to have ‘organic’ content on your website, this may take the form of a short video introduction or an interactive powerpoint presentation. These types of features will anyway keep your website interesting for visitors.
It is still worthwhile submitting your website to the main search engines Google and Bing, submission to search engines is not so important as it once was but a couple of times after a website is launched will at least get your pages indexed a little sooner. Listings on directories are important, you should submit your website to the relevant section on the Open Directory and take at least one paid directory for example yahoo.com or botw.com.
a very important element of SEO currently is links to your website. Links to your website are viewed by the search engines as ‘votes of confidence’. You can add a link exchange area to your website and actively seek exchanges via websites such as link2me.com, however only exchange links with websites which have content relevant to your own and try to exchange links with websites which have Google Page Ranking. The most effective links are one way links – links to your website without a reciprocal link back. These links can be obtained via free directories and you can purchase a package of high Google Page Ranking directory submissions, about 1,000 would be advisable.
Other excellent means of building links to your website are article directories. Write articles on your subject and then submit them to quality directories such as ezine and with each article published you will also get a link to your website. article directories also raise the profile of your website and bring traffic directly.
Finally, well worth a mention are the social media websites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. I find LinkedIn particularly useful. Set yourself up accounts, build your profile, link to your own website, join groups, place articles, etc. all this brings quality traffic to your website and is also quite good fun.
The search engine algorithms are changing and evolving all the time and SEO is an ongoing process, however if you do at least some of the things we’ve suggested here you will have a far greater chance of making you online strategy a success.
Written by Carl Roughsedge a Director of e-Moonlighting and an Ezinearticles.com Platinum Expert author