How to drive to business Increasing Traffic online your website
How to drive traffic to business Increasing Traffic to your website
Using The Right Software
If you have the money for it you can always outsource the development part of the website, but this is not the cheapest thing in the world to do. Of course, you can find freelancers who are willing to do the job cheaply, but then their concept of what you need and yours may be poles apart.
Like most businesses good website designers tend to charge more. This does not however mean that you should pay through your nose to get your website developed. There are a number of CMS tools that you can use to develop your own site. There is a whole hoard of software that you can use and each of them gives you different functionality.
You could go with online ones that allow you to develop and publish everything online, or you can go with applications that allow you to develop your site locally and then publish it online. You get both paid as well as open source software and what you use depends on what you are most comfortable with.
It may take you some time to develop anything approaching what you think is nice, but it is recommended that you do this yourself if you have the time to spare. It gives you much more control over how you design your own website and you can have everything exactly how you want it.
Follow simple naming conventions
Another reason why it is better for you to develop your own site is that you can follow your own naming convention. Recent studies have showed that sites that have easy to remember addresses tend to get more traffic than those that have a meaningless jumble of numbers and alphabets.
For example if you want to have a website that reviews software, just go with www.thesitename/home. If from there you want to have a page about you, then follow the same principle except that instead of /home you will have /aboutme. This is much better than having something that looks like this.....
There may be a very good reason for you doing this, but it is better to have things simple. Your address is not a password for it to have alpha numeric characters.
Why this matters is really not known except that it does seem to have an impact on web traffic.
In the same way links that lead deeper into your own website needs to have meaningful keywords, not a link with click here on it. You may think that this is default, but it is very easy to overlook these small things that have a big impact on the numbers.
Using the Right Content
Using the right content is a very important factor when it comes to developing your website. Optimizing the content does not only refer to SEO or Search Engine Optimization, but also to the layout of the website as well as each page.
SEO
This is an acronym that has been used and reused so many times that many people think that this is the only thing about a website that makes it get a higher ranking. Obviously search engines will make use of keywords to index your articles, but the problem is that when writing content we can only take into account a few words or phrases that we think is what the whole world is looking for. Yet, all search engines will pull out your articles even using other keywords, words that you would not consider as keywords at all.
The best thing to do is to use industry specific words to ensure that you have a wide distribution of words. For example, if you are creating a food website where you plan on putting up different recipes, make sure that you include all the words that you think will be used to search for your article. Words like cooking, recipes, dish etc. are all different words that can be used because it is all different ways for the public to search for the same thing.
There is fierce competition with regards to optimizing the content and most of the larger websites would make sure that they corral most if not all the keywords that
they think are important. Yet, this does not mean that your site will be low down in the ranking. Ranking of a site by a search engine is based on a combination of factors and SEO is only one of them.
Layout optimization
Most search engines use programs called spiders or crawlers to index your site. These spiders or crawlers are nothing but programs that mimic human behavior but with the added capacity to tag and index everything that they visit. Generally speaking these crawlers go top to down and left to right. This means that the top left hand corner of your site is the most valuable piece of real estate while the bottom right hand corner is the least.
Knowing this will help you to optimize your layout better. For example if you are designing your home page, it would be a better idea to put in the links to other informational content on top and less important information like the about us link at the bottom.
Always tag pictures
Another thing that you should remember is that crawlers cannot read through graphics or scripts. This means that even if you subscribe to the belief that a picture is worth a thousand words, it is still a good idea for you to write a dozen words under the picture defining what it is. Only this text will be used by the search engine for its indexing purposes, which is why if you look up any result in Google images you will sometimes find that the images do not have anything to do with your search string, but the keywords would be present in its description.
Some people use this defect to leverage their site by adding in keywords that are not entirely suitable, and you are the only judge as to whether this is a risk worth taking. Search engines are always evolving, and if at some point in the future they redefine their algorithm so that they can identify such keyword stuffing, you will find that your website has all of a sudden lost its ranking. Google is definitely not going to notify the world that it is going to do this giving you time to change your site. When you find out it is already too late.
Using META Tags
If you have done a little bit of looking around before you started working on developing your website, you would have come across the term Meta tags. Many websites recommend that you use them when you develop your website. These Meta tags are nothing but HTML tags that are not visible on the page itself and are usually included inside the <HEAD> tag of the page.
Most of the advice will be towards you stuffing all your keywords within these tags. You can even put in keywords that do not occur within the body of the article itself. For example, if you are setting up a cooking website and plan on introducing various recipes and if one of the recipes have to do with making chicken dumplings, you can add this plus combinations of the same keyword like for example, good chicken dumplings, or best chicken dumplings or any other search string that you feel you want to add, but which may not necessarily sit well within the body of the article.
They don't work for keyword stuffing
Unfortunately most search engines just ignore this tag and anything within. They started doing this nearly a decade back and nowadays even the use of this tag is highly debated in certain circles. The reason for this is because many web-masters started stuffing in keywords that did not have anything to do with their sites at all just to start directing more traffic there.
Anyway the bottom line is that if you use this tag to stuff in keywords you may even be doing yourself harm because some search engines actually penalize sites that do this.
Where do I use Meta Tags?
This does not mean that Meta tags are totally useless. Some search engines use what is inside the Meta tags coupled with what is within the articles to get a better idea of what the site contains. This is why the initial advice was to only include keywords that are related to what you are writing about.
Another thing that you can do is to put in a short description of what the site is about within this tag. If we take the same cooking website as an example, you could write a short one-liner like this “A simple recipe to make chicken dumplings within 30
minutes”. Usually this line would be incorporated to some extent in the summary that is given below your website in the search results page. This does not mean that all search engines will start to display what is within these tags but you at least have some amount of control over what is said about your site. Even Google that has come out a few years back and said that they ignore Meta tags, nowadays incorporate at least some amount of what is available in the Meta tags in their summary.
Other uses
There are also other uses for Meta tags like if you do not want to index certain pages in your site, or if you do not want the search engines crawlers not to follow certain links in your site. Using Meta tags with the noindex or nofollow options will give you this. You may wonder why anyone would even want to not index their site, but there are cases when it is helpful. For example, if you have written an article on a certain subject, but over a few years you find that things have progressed and that this article may not be relevant any more, you have the option of removing that page, or archiving it. Unless you specify that you do not want this page indexed it will continue to show up on searches, and because it has been around far longer than the updated page will be higher in the rankings.
You can also use the tags to specify the content type, like if it is text or graphics, and the language used. Although this does not make that big a difference, it is really helpful, especially for those sites that offer a number of language options. The search engines will be better able to index each page separately, instead of taking everything to be duplicate content.
Your Blog
Blogging is something that most web surfers do. They either have their own blogs or they comment on others'. Having a blog page where you can post your thoughts and have others respond is therefore a good idea. A blog is not a comments page for your article. A blog is where people can share their thoughts on the articles posted.
You can therefore have a website where you give reviews and sell software, and have a blog where you can discuss everything from how a certain IT company is following trade practices to the state of the economy. These comments may not find suitable space anywhere other than your blog and having a separate page for it is a good idea.
Have your blog in your website
This is something that a number of people fail to do. They will have a website and have a blog, but they will both be in different domains. Some people actually go to the time and the effort of creating their own website but host their blogs using free software like WordPress
Leaving aside the impracticality of this, you will also be losing out on driving traffic to your site from your blog. Web traffic is not all generated through just one source and it is only by combining a number of sources that you get where you want to be. Blogs are one of these options. If you have started blogging about an interesting topic there is every reason for people to follow through to your website if it were in the same domain. By splitting them up in different locations you are losing on a certain amount of the traffic.
The best way is to host your blog as a sub-domain of your primary domain which is your website, and the worst is to use other hosting sites like BlogSpot or WordPress. By hosting your WordPress blog on your own webspace, you increase your website size and content range, by discussing and talking about your website content via your own blog. This way the search engines not only see your website blog, but they also see your website which is linking in. Creating back links to your website from blogs is an amazing way to get extra traffic.
Hold off on Comments
Most people who create their websites make sure that they incorporate a comments section. This is done so that people who visit can start to leave comments. This is very useful because many times people who comment on your section will also link back to their articles on similar topics. Of course, people do this to increase their own ranking, but it is also helpful to you if you have more unique people linking to your site. It improves your standing with the search engines tremendously.
There is one problem with this though and that this section is like a two edged sword. If you are a regular web surfer you would have come across umpteen sites where there is not one single comment written. Of course you can employ others to write in a few, but it is very easy to make out the real ones from the fake. Rather than do this it is better to leave the comments section blank.
Yet, leaving it blank seems to imply that your site really does not have many followers. It can give an empty feeling to the site and even if the content is quite good, just because there is not a single comment in it many people will not return to your site.
When do I start it?
The best way to tackle this is to start up this section after some time. During this time you will be trying various different methods to improve the rankings and improve traffic to your site. Once you find that you are getting around 500 to 700 hits who stay for some time every day would be the right time for you to start this section. If you are offering an RSS feed you can start as soon as you hit the one hundred subscribers mark.
What you are ensuring by doing this is that your site has a minimum quorum that will at least follow up on comments once someone starts off. Plus, you are also improving your chances of having at least one in this group who will in the least leave a “Good job” in the comments section. Of course, you may lose out on comments on previous articles, but it is a risk that you will have to take.
There is no rule governing how long it will take for this to happen. For all you know you may start seeing a lot of activity in your blog once you post your first article itself and if you find that there are a number of people leaving comments about what you
have written, you can open the section on the second day itself. All we advise you to do is to open the comments section only when you feel that you will have a good number of followers who will use the section instead of leaving it empty.
Create a Sitemap
A sitemap is just one page where you have the whole layout of your website. Smaller simpler websites may not necessarily want one, but sites that have a number of pages definitely have to have one. This page is very important for two reasons.
First, if you have or are planning to have a large number of pages to your website, it is better to have one page from where people can navigate to different places on your site. It makes the whole browsing experience simpler making sure that you do not lose any visitors because they feel that navigating your site is too complicated.
Second, this page is important because you can submit this page to search engines to index. This has the double advantage of forcing the search engine crawlers to follow all the links in the page thus indexing all pages and also ensures that your site gets indexed quicker. Sometimes, especially if your site has a large number of pages crawlers do not probe more than two links into the site meaning that pages that lead deeper into your site are left un-indexed.
Many people who have such sitemaps find that this page gets ranked much higher in most search engines for most keywords than the actual page dealing with the keyword giving you the double benefit of a higher ranking as well as making sure that people visit other pages in your site.
How do you organize the sitemap?
This is basically up to you. Some people just have one page where they have links to all the pages in their website. This page will not be visible to the browsing public, but will be useful for the search engines to index all the pages in your website. This is the simplest form of having a sitemap
Others use JavaScript drop down menus to help navigate their sites, but then the crawlers do not read this. This means that you will have to have a text version of the sitemap done just so that it gets indexed. You can always keep this portion invisible while keeping the scripted portion visible.
The formatting of the page is up to you. Depending on the number of main pages you can follow the traditional top across, or left vertical method. If you are good at designing you can even follow a completely new method. It is however safer to stick with the traditional if only because it gives some familiarity to your website from the point of view of first time visitors.
Big Traffic
Traffic to websites is a very fickle thing. There may be days when there is almost no activity, and there may be days when the amount of activity can almost bring your site down. Only with experience can you gauge if there is any pattern to this or not. Different sites dealing with different subjects have different patterns and there is no way to gauge what sort of traffic pattern you will have until you start yours and keep it running for some time.
It is however a given that there will be days when you see a bump up in traffic. There may be a very sound reason for this, for example, if you are releasing new software on your site. Other times, your site may be pulled out of near obscurity simply because some factor outside your influence has turned the public eye your way.
For example, if you have a site that deals with global warming, you will see a certain amount of activity on a daily basis, and then one fine day there may be a storm somewhere that put a whole township under water, or a huge chunk of an iceberg may break off the Antarctic. The next day you may see a tremendous jump up in traffic.
As soon as you see that there is a jump in the traffic, even if only slight, make sure that you take advantage of it. Start increasing the number of posts, and make sure that there is some activity in your site within the next 24 hrs. Some web surfers are not known the most loyal and will immediately forget about your site if there is nothing happening for more than a day.
In this day and age where things happen really fast, it is the people who keep track and take advantage of small shifts in traffic patterns who do well. The web is a media outlet much like your television, and if there is something happening and a particular channel is not covering it, how long would you stay with that channel. Exactly how long others will stay with you if you do not take advantage of something happening in your field.
You may only have a site that has software for sale, but if Apple is releasing a new version of their iPod it is best to take it up. If you feel that the topic is outside the scope of your site, start a topic on your blog, that's what blogs are for. This is also a good way of driving traffic to your site, especially if you have your blog as a sub-domain.
Become Part of an Online Community
This is something that most people who have websites will have to do as a default. These online communities are where people meet and share information or just chat, all without moving from their chair. Whether you know it or not, just creating an ID in a community like Facebook or Twitter will ensure that you get some activity to your page. Even if there is nothing there to attract people, there may be people who just find your name appealing and visit your page.
Making sure that you devote time to having a good profile in these communities, and update them as to what is new is a good way of telling people about what you are doing. If you are in real earnest, you can be connected to hundreds, or thousands of
people whom you hardly know, and if you can coax a portion of them to visit your site, you are once again driving that little more traffic your way.
Get to know the community
Before you start planning on using any community as a marketing tool, first know what they are. These places are just a virtual place where you can network with your friends, but the social etiquette remains. This means that just as you cannot go to your club and then start selling stuff there to your fellow club members; you cannot do that online either. Many people would be shocked to even consider doing something like this at their club, but will not think twice about approaching their network online.
Yet, unlike a club a networking site online gives you a number of facilities, the least of which is that you can inform your network about anything new in your life. Just as people would not take it badly if you sent out bulk messages that you have gotten married or have a child, you can inform people that you are starting a new venture. If worded properly you will receive replies wishing you the best in your new venture.
Don't market
This is the last thing that you must do. Many people make this mistake and pay for it by not only not getting any increase in traffic, but by making sure that they have effectively alienated their network because they have just showed themselves to be someone who uses their personal network for business. Your Facebook or Twitter ID is where you post what is happening with you, not a place where you sell products or services; you do that in your website. For example, if you have a website that deals with cooking, and offer recipes, make sure that this is part of your ID. At a later date if you want to bring out a short book of recipes for a price that you hope to sell online as an eBook, just telling your network about it will give you a lot of dividends. Don't approach them telling them that you hope that they will support your new venture by buying what you are selling, that is the worst thing that you can do.
Instead treat them as you would your friends. Just keep them informed about what's happening with your life, and that this is a big thing with you. If you don't push your product, you will be prompting people to at least visit your site to take a look at what you have to offer. As to whether they buy your book or not depends a lot on other factors the least of them being that the book should have some real stuff that they cannot find for free elsewhere.
But even if your book does not sell, you have done something else, and that is to drive traffic to your site and the bottom line is that even if one income stream, you hoping to make money out of the book, does not click, you will probably make some out of your advertisers because of the increased traffic.
Be Patient
There is probably no other piece of advice that is as important as this. It takes time to do anything and there is no way that you are going to become an instant success. If you take the success stories of any person, you will find that there are two things in common, hard work and time.
Do not start a website unless you feel passionately that it will work. If you do believe that it will work you should be willing to sacrifice a lot of time and effort to make it work. Even if you have the best content and do everything else that is supposed to guarantee that your site will become a hit, you still need to give sufficient time for it to work.
Google sandbox
Another reason for being patient is because of something that is commonly referred to as the Google sandbox. This sandbox is just a theory that a number of web masters feel is true although Google has not come right out and admitted it. A few things that they have mentioned however seem to indicate that there is a sandbox that Google uses.
This sandbox is just a virtual box where Google dumps new websites or sites that Google believes are setting out deliberately to cheat their search engine, or even sites that have been taken over by spammers. Since there is no direct conformation from Google that there is really a sandbox finding out if your website is there is a little difficult.
There are a few pointers though. First, if you have just launched your website, it is almost guaranteed that your site is there. It is possible that your site can have a page rank, and it may even pop up on subsidiary searches, but any direct search will not show your site on the results page.
This sandboxing is different from Google penalizing you. If you are in penalty then you will lose your page rank and sometimes the Google search area may even be greyed out. In the sandbox the website just sits around until Google deems it to be a worthy website to start to display on its results page.
Why this sandbox
Since designing web pages is actually not as expensive as other forms of marketing, many organizations started to create websites just for promotional purposes and then shut it down. This meant that there were a number of results with broken links in Google, not a good thing for any search engine.
Spammers are another reason for this. Until this sandboxing by Google started, spammers used to start a site just to send out spam, but these sites tended to get very high ranking in a short time, once again something that search engines do not want in their results.
There are a number of other reasons for Google adopting this policy, but suffice it to say that it is there for a purpose, to weed out the real from the fake. The duration that websites stay in this sandbox can last anywhere between a couple of months to a year. Nobody has too much information about this, and your guess is probably as good as any other person's out there. The only thing that you can do here is to be patient. Continue with adding in more content and link back, in short continue to operate as if your website were not in limbo. There are two reasons for this. One is the very simple reason that Google is not going to notify you before it removes your site from its sandbox and unless you are prepared you will be caught napping.
The other
reason is that you can take this time to refine your website so that once it comes out of the sandbox you will be ready to take advantage of an exponential increase in your ranking.
You can't beat it
There are a number of websites that offer supposedly guaranteed ways to remove your site from the sandbox, but it is good to take all this advice with a pinch of salt. Google has done this with a purpose and unless you can show specific cause, there is no reason for them to excuse you. Even if you do everything that you can think of to show Google that you are really a genuine site, there is no guarantee that it will work.
It is much better to include this time into your ramping up schedule but have a strategy in place to take advantage of the time that your website comes out of the sandbox.
Of course you can purchase an established site instead of creating one of your own, which means that you can hit the ground running, but even here, people have found that sites that frequently change their ownership find themselves put into the sandbox. It is useless to speculate on why this happens. A much better idea is for you to accept it and plan accordingly.
Be Nice to People and Customers
This is the final piece of the jigsaw and is both the first as well as the last thing that you have to remember. People sometimes tend to confuse being professional with not being nice without realizing that you can be professional and at the same time be nice.
Being nice is not something that you should have to work at. It is supposed to come naturally, as naturally as wishing your neighbors “Good morning”. Yet it is still something that you should always keep in mind because with success comes an inflated sense of your own importance, and then you will not be nice any longer.
Why this being nice is important is because if you leave aside the purely moralistic aspect of this, it will tend to net you more money than if you are not. Just think of yourself going out to buy something, would you rather go to a person who is nice to you and makes you feel comfortable, or go to a place that does not. Most times even if going to the store where you like to go takes you longer you will still want to go there.
People online are the same; they will tend to overlook some faults on your side just because you are nice. Over time you can build such a strong brand image that it will become the hallmark of your website and yours can actually be a case in point of how even a very ordinary looking website has still managed to get such a high ranking on Google and manages to consistently hit numbers in the millions every week.
People do not visit a site anymore because it looks nice or because the graphics are amazing. This has become so common that there is nothing new in it. If you do go this way you will have to introduce some change every other week and not only is this exhausting, you will be incurring tremendous costs too.
People come to you because their browsing experience is good, and one of the best ways of doing this is being nice. Respond to every comment that people leave. Thank someone who wishes you well and help out someone who is asking you for it, however inane the question is. There are many ways in which you can be nice that it is practically impossible to tell a person how. It is just in the mindset. Many people who are nice enough in the beginning tend to get a little abrasive once they see a bit
of success without even realizing that they have become so and it is best if you bear this in mind.
Conclusion
Increasing traffic to your website is not an easy thing because there is no one thing that accounts for most of the traffic. If there were two factors that accounted for 50% of your traffic it is very easy to keep a track of it and ensure that there are no mistakes. Unfortunately traffic depends on a lot of small things that together give you the numbers.
If you think SEO optimization is what you need to be doing to get higher numbers, you will be surprised to find that it is actually backfiring if you leave out on quality of the content. If you concentrate a lot on the layout and do not spend much time thinking about the browsing experience, you are once again not doing everything. It is like a jigsaw that has a number of small pieces that have to mesh together, and even if one is missing there will be a very noticeable hole in the picture.
The basics like the content, tagging, linking, and layout are the first thing that you need to think of, but this will only let you achieve a certain amount of the potential that your site is capable of. You will still have to market it properly which is where the “driving traffic” comes in. Because everything is so cheap on the net when compared to traditional marketing, your costs may be lower, but this is offset by the amount of competition that you will have.
We have tried to give you a general idea of all the things that you will have to think of when you start your website. The net is a dynamic place and is constantly in flux. These tips are the basics that you need to get right while starting out. Once you have done all this you will have to figure out innovative methods of marketing your site to take it to the next level.
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