31 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Business Web Site

About.com

Web site promotion has become a time consuming project and a new position in the web design industry, Search Engine Consultants, has been created. Use the list below to find ways that your business web site will be found by your ideal client, is user friendly and is visited often.

1. Build a strong, solid business foundation. Design a business plan, marketing plan, ideal client profile and 30-second elevator speech.

2. Be consistent and “brand” your company. Use the same colors, logo, motto, etc. everywhere on your business web site!

3. Make your business web site trustable.

4. Create policies that build trust: customer service, code of ethics and newsletter privacy policy.

5. Ask your web master to name each of your pages using a keyword you have supplied them with.

6. Offer added values on your business web site that make sense to your business and ideal client. This can include affiliate programs, books, and recommended links to web sites.

7. Add a “favorites or bookmark this site” script to some of your business web site pages.

8. Add a "Recommend This Site" on your site. If someone visits your business Web site and knows someone else who may appreciate it, this feature will e-mail the page's link to a recipient.

9. If you have pages on your business web site that you update monthly (like an articles page or recommended links page) say so on the page.

10. Join a few Web rings. For additional information, visit WebRing and Bravenet.

11. Provide a subscription box, to your e-zine or business announcement list, on your most viewed business web site pages.

12. On large business web sites, create a "What's New Page" or even better, ask your web designer to design a "Site Map" for your visitors.

13. Search engines look for certain things - titles, headings, meta tags - so it is crucial to make sure your site is "search engine friendly". Visit the Search Engine Optimization and Submission page on this site for additional resources on search engines and search engine submission tips.

a. TITLE tags: Title tags should be 60 or so characters and include some keywords.

b. Header tags are numbered from 1 to 7: some search engines recognize Header tags. So make sure you use these tags for each of the titles on your page.

c. Keyword Meta tags: Add no more than 15 to 20 keywords to keep the search engines from flagging your site for keyword spamming. Prioritize your words. The best way to submit to search engines is to submit to each search engine individually.

d. Use keywords in the text area of each page. They are especially important at the beginning of sentences and higher up on the page.

e. To learn more about meta tags and choosing keywords, read "Effective Search Engine Optimization" (from About Small Business: Canada).

14. Search engines do not find your site unless you submit your site's information to them. Below are four ways to submit your Web site to search engines:

a. It is recommended that you submit to search engines individually (this is also the way I do it and it works great, but is time consuming)!

b. Since some people prefer to use a free service to submit their sites to search engines, I recommend that they open a free e-mail address to use when you do "anything" for free on the World Wide Web. Two good search engine submission services are Submit It!, and Scrub The Web. You can pay for a program that will assist you to submit and critique your site such as WebPosition Gold.

c. Hire a Search Engine Optimization Expert to handle your search engine submissions.

15. Visit these search engine information sites: Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Guide.

16. Find easy and secure ways for your clients to pay you. A shopping cart and a secure way to accept checks and/or credit cards work very well.

17. Check your business web site's links regularly to make sure they all work. Use a free link checker such as Xenu's Link Sleuth.

18. Provide monthly chats or bulletin boards (forums) to build relationships and community.

19. Conduct periodic contests and announce the winners on your site.

20. Offer a free e-book or e-report on your site. Its size doesn’t matter if you’re providing it for free and it’s specifically for your ideal client. Provide permission for the e-book to be forwarded to others for their personal use.

21. Write articles, post them to your business Web site, and submit them to article banks.

22. Design some quizzes or surveys. Statistics show that visitors love quizzes and assessment tools.

23. Participate in online forums as an expert. You get to "quietly" promote your business in your three or four line signature.

24. Place your business web site address on all your printed literature -- business cards, brochures, newsletters, letterhead, e-mail signature, ads - everything!!

25. Promote your web address in your signature for e-mails (change it regularly to highlight something new you're promoting).

26. Teach classes or speak to groups about subjects relating to your products.

27. Network locally to bring people to your site.

28. “Permission Market” by gathering, in writing, the e-mail addresses of students, or an audience as part of your evaluation forms. Create index cards so that you can invite your friends, networking partners or associates to join your list. Keep any papers involved in this process for at least a year or two.

29. When your business web site is launched, updated, or you write a free e-book, send a Press Release to the media, your clients, and friends and associates, too.

30. Want to know more about Internet Marketing? Visit this Internet Marketing Index at Internet.com's Interactive Marketing Channel.

31. If this list of web site promotion ideas seems overwhelming, visit your favorite search engine to conduct a search for Search Engine Optimizers and Consultants or ask others who they use and would recommend.

Phone leads sovereign in global web traffic

Also in October, Apple was able to significantly expand its market share in mobile web use. Once a month, the recently released Google acquired ad network AdMob's statistics on the worldwide mobile web experience. And for several months, is Apple's iPhone OS - and thus the data traffic that is caused by iPhone and iPod touch - the undisputed number one. This has remained unchanged in October, on the contrary. Apple could from September to October to expand its leadership role on. The global share of iPhone OS data traffic on the Internet increased from 43 to 50 percent. In second place are two devices with Symbian (which is predominantly used by Nokia), which, however, lost interest and dropped from 29 to 25 percent. Google's Android could grow one percentage point and is in third place with 11 percent.

Research In Motion's BlackBerry device gave off a percentage point to 7 percent and came in fourth place. Microsoft's Windows Mobile has further lost and limbo with just three percent of fifth place. The fifth and sixth place to go with WebOS and Palm OS to Palm, and also get a total of three percent. From September to October was the iPhone to expand its global market share of mobile web usage from 43 to a full 50 percent. (In the same amount of time that is mainly used on Symbian Nokia mobile phone) from 29 to 25 percent. Android could dazugewinnen one percentage point and now stands at 11 percent. BlackBerrys followed by 7 percent (September 8 percent) to fourth place, is located off of fifth place Windows Mobile, which lost market share further and now stands at only 3 percent.

Traffic War

Ever been to a market? A fish market or a street market selling such things as vegetables and fruit? It’s a very special world, lively and busy where all market players are pushing each others in order to get the best spot.

Internet is very similar to a street market in many ways. There are a couple of keywords that really would work very well for your business.
Type your favorite keywords in Google and heck the number of results sitting there: MILLIONS!

You are only the new guy. You had no idea you’d have to queue behind millions of already-existing websites standing there, in front of your customers and proud to be in the first pages of Google results.

Are you going to queue? No, it’s Traffic War!!!

This is the best topic ever discussed on internet: Moving your shop from a back alley to the main street.
These are exciting times, things happening now could never have happened before, at least not that fast.

Why be in the yellow pages when 10 competitors are on the coverpage?

It all starts with words, so we will definitely talk again about words in the next post: Choose the right keywords for your business.

Website promotion More techniques

 

After being accepted into the largest directories and having pages of your site come up in answer to searches done at the major search engines, the long hours that you've spent on website promotion have begun to pay off and your daily visitor count is starting to look good. But there is still plenty you can do to help your site attract even more traffic.

In phase three, we'll examine different promotion methods that you might want to try. However, in order to prevent you from wasting your time on things that don't work, we'll also go over a few techniques that have proven to be less than spectacular when I experimented with them.

Step one - Keep these in mind

First, let's take a look at the good stuff. The articles introduced in this step are about the website promotion methods that are at least partially effective. Some of them work better than others, but if used correctly, all of them can produce results that will be worth your while. Of course, most of the articles include advice on what you need to do to obtain the best possible results with the method discussed.

1. If you sell something on your site, you might want to try banner ads. Usually banner campaigns are seen as expensive and ineffective, but it is partially because advertisers don't know how to design good banners.
2. Read the article on how to increase traffic with return visitors. Getting people to come back is the secret to why some sites get amazingly many hits per day.
3. Learn what reciprocal links are and how to get them, then put that knowledge into use. In addition to sending you visitors, reciprocal links will also increase your link popularity and help your site rank higher in the search engines.
4. Start using E-mail signatures. They might not produce thousands of visitors, but are a great way to promote your site a bit without having to actually do anything.
5. Evaluate whether your site could benefit from joining a topsite list. These lists have their good and bad sides, but might be at least worth a try.
6. Consider trying to build traffic with Usenet advertising. It can give you a nice traffic boost and help spread the word about your site, but only if done properly. Read the article to learn why Usenet promotion should only be done with great care.
7. Writing newsletter articles often works well and can send you large amounts of targeted traffic in a short period of time, for free.

Step two - Forget these

As said, everything just doesn't always work the way it should in the world of promotion. In step two, our attention is focused on website promotion methods that are more trouble than they are worth. They might not be entirely useless, but your time would be better spent on improving your site or spreading the word about your site in other ways.

1. Click exchange programs are easy, fast, free and will get you a lot of visitors. That's why it might be a surprise to hear that they really aren't good website promotion tools.
2. A lot has been written about FFA pages and for the past few years, most of it has been negative. The only thing they are good for is increasing the flow of spam to your E-mail address.
3. Winning website awards can occasionally be useful, especially if the awards are well-known. However, sometimes the winner of the award is not the real winner.

Final words

Congratulate yourself for being persistent, bright and hard-working. Most get frustrated and quit before this point, which is why most sites never become anything. After all, the secret to having a successful site is working hard in both promoting

and creating it. You just might have what it takes.

After going through those three phases, you've read just about everything this site has to offer. While there is more to website promotion than what we have discussed here, you now know quite a lot about the subject. If you still desire more information, don't forget to come back to this site every now and then. This tutorial is always incomplete, because I continuously notice things that I want to write about.

I hope that A Promotion Guide has been able to help you to make your site more popular and thus given you the chance to spread your ideas and thoughts to a larger audience. And remember, if you have achieved good results, it's not because I showed you how to do it - it's because you did it.

Website promotion - Search engines

 

Now that your site has been included in ODP and Yahoo, you should already be receiving clearly more traffic than before. The next task is to get to know search engines and use them to bring even more people to your pages. Because you have completed phase one, you have established a good foundation for making your site perform well in the search engines.

Step one - Search engine optimization, basics

In order to gain good rankings, you'll need to learn the basics of search engine algorithms (ranking systems) and adjust your pages to meet their criteria as well as possible. This will take some time and effort, but doing some work now will save you from a lot of trouble in the future.

1. First, try to make the design of your site as search engine friendly as possible. To read more about the subject, take a look at my article about website optimization.
2. Next, you'll need to do some keyword optimization. Sounds frightening, but in plain English it simply means choosing the correct keywords for your pages. Using the wrong words is perhaps the most common reason why people don't get satisfying results from their search engine optimization work.
3. Continue by reading these search engine optimization tips.
4. Read the article about META tags and add them to all of your pages. The META keywords tag isn't absolutely necessary, but the META description tag is very important.
5. Learn what link popularity is and how search engines use it to rank your pages.
6. Unless you have already done so, read about Google's algorithm. Google is among the most popular search services of today, so it is wise to take its requirements into account.
7. Use all of this information to optimize your pages for the search engines.

Step two - Search engine optimization, advanced

Your site is now adequately prepared to really start bringing in traffic from search engines. But if you want to widen your knowledge about them and increase your chances of success, you still have some work to do. On the other hand, if you're totally exhausted and just want to get this thing over with, you'll be delighted to know that this step isn't absolutely necessary.

1. Study some of the more advanced things related to search engine optimization. Among them are cloaking, css tricks, doorway pages, themes and how to improve your search engine ranking with click popularity.
2. Read about the things you should avoid doing from this article that outlines common web site promotion mistakes.

Step three - Submitting to search engines?

Now is the time to make sure that your site has a presence in the indexes of major search engines. Fortunately, they are quite good at finding your site on their own. There are things you can do to help them, though..

1. Get to know how search engine submission works and how the search engines determine which sites to list.
2. Read the article "Targeting your search engine marketing" to see which engines are the most popular ones.
3. If you are running a commercial site, you might also want to consider paying for search engine placement. Take a look at how you can use PPC search engine advertising to buy your way to the top.

Website promotion - Directories

You should start your website promotion efforts by listing your site at the most popular Internet directories. Because they can send you substantial amounts of traffic and affect your ranking in various search engines, it is wise to make sure that your site is present in all of the major directories before doing anything else.

Step one - General information

Submitting to directories is easy and doesn't require much effort. It's ensuring that your submission will be accepted that makes this task a hard one.

1. First, read "Boost your traffic with website directories" to get a basic idea on what directories are and how to submit to them.
2. Examine the article about web page design to get some tips on how to improve your site and reduce the chances of it being rejected.

Step two - The Open Directory Project

Start with the Open Directory Project. While your site has to offer good, unique content to be accepted to the ODP, its editors usually review sites quickly and won't reject them without a good reason for doing so. This, along with the fact that submitting to the ODP is free of charge, makes it a perfect starting point. Completing this step successfully will also provide you with experience that will prove to be very valuable later on.

1. Read my thoughts on how Google's ranking algorithm works and notice how an ODP listing seems to affect your ranking at Google. Keep this information in mind when you submit.
2. Take a look at the advice on submitting your website to the ODP.
3. Finally, submit your site to the ODP.
4. If your submission isn't successful, consider becoming an editor at the Open Directory and listing your own site.

Step three - Yahoo

After securing a listing at ODP, your next task is to get the folks at Yahoo to notice that your site exists and is worth a place in their directory. This might cost you a fair amount of money if you are running a commercial site, but is usually worth it. Non-commercial sites can get in for free, but might require several submissions and a lot of patience before they are accepted.

1. Check out the Yahoo-specific guidelines and hints and the article about how Yahoo's search feature ranks sites.
2. Bite the bullet and submit your site to Yahoo.

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