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Building Traffic For Your Website
By Andre Hinds
From Income Opportunities magazine, 2000
If you have a website, you've probably realized that getting people to visit it is one of the major challenges of making the site a success.
That's true for small companies and large ones, and many man-hours are spent each week trying to come up with new and better ideas for attracting visitors.
Truth is, there is no magic potion for getting people to visit your website. As with a real storefront business, it takes a dedicated promotional effort. The editors of Income Opportunities have compiled the following suggestions to help you drive more traffic to your website and, consequently, make more sales.
-- What's in a name? Plenty, if you want to build electronic commerce. Make sure your domain name is easy to remember and easy to type. Avoid abbreviations, numerals and dashes.
-- List your site on search engines. One of the most popular ways to find a website is to search for it on Yahoo, Alta Vista or other search engines. Each search engine has instructions on how you can include your site. Most search engines charge nothing for this service.
-- Create meta tags to get a better position on search engines. You can list keywords on your page that are cataloged by search engines and help your site get listed higher during a search. For more information, visit www.searchenginewatch.com.
-- Create reciprocal links. There are probably other websites complementary in nature to yours. Set up a page where you link to those sites in return for them setting up links to your site.
-- Your web address is just as important as your physical address, so be sure to include it on all your business cards, stationery, e-mail letters and other correspondence. If you're a service business, add the web address to your trucks, caps and shirt patches.
-- Never publish another ad or send out another press release without your web address. Once you set up a website, you should use press releases to publicize it.
-- Collect e-mail addresses from your existing customers and send out periodic e-mail notices to tell them of new things going on in your business or at your website.
-- Offer a sweepstakes or giveaway to draw people to your site on a regular basis. This increases word-of-mouth promotion as visitors tell their friends to get in on the action.