How do I get traffic to my site once it’s designed? Glad you asked that. A beautiful, functional, useable site doesn’t do you any good at all if nobody sees it. We can work with you to develop an on-line marketing strategy that will build you traffic from highly targeted customers.
But what about the sites that offer ‘Guaranteed traffic’ for as many as 100,000 hits a month? They seem inexpensive, and after all they’re professionals. Are they worth it?
In short. No. Not really. You see what they’re guaranteeing is that your server will get traffic, not that buying customers will come to your site.
These sites list your website with all the search engines under the sun. That much is true. The problem is that it is very hard, if not impossible for them to make sure that it is your target audience that sees your site, and not a mindless spidering bot who’s only objective is to ‘hit’ as many sites as possible per minute.
These spiders scan the web and categorize for all sorts of reasons, and a lot of them are not really search engines at all, but serve other information gathering purposes. Your site could be spidered by the competition, companies conducting informational surveys and even unsavory bots that are looking for a way to get into your system and created havoc. (Hackers)
Sometimes the load your site in windows that load your completely off-screen, load it as a tiny image in the corner of a page, or ‘cheat’ your counter and never even show the site at all. They run bots of their own that load and un-load your pages thousands of times without being seen by a human.
These companies are taking your money and laughing all the way to the bank, and you will never, see any benefit from all that so-called ” traffic’.
Many of them use casino or lottery links and force users to click an ad, possibly yours to enter the site. These are often pop-up or under ads that annoy the user and have basically nothing to do with the site they are presented on. Sometimes they simply use spam with phony remove links that ‘hit’ your site.
Is that the kind of traffic you want to bring to your company?
Reality check: If the target to your site is not very carefully targeted it’s a waste of time.
What does work then?
OK, so on a more positive note, let’s talk about some options that DO work.
Targeting your market means that first you must know who that is. What they like, what they dislike, ideas or designs that will appeal to them. Spend some time thinking about it. Survey existing customers. And while you’re surveying, don’t forget to survey your staff as well. More than anybody else they should know who your client is and be able to profile them accurately.
Find other sites that create the ambiance you think your target market is looking for.
Are you an architect? What style do you want oto project? Modern? Craftsman? Show these sites to your designers and ask them to put together something with the same appeal. Not a copy, but your unique design with the same design goal.
Talk to other websites that have users who might like your product. Offer them reciprocal links and perhaps even content. (How about giving a recipe site some recipes from the chef?)
Try corss promotion. Are there sites that offer complementary services? Hotels around the conference center often link to the conference center, restaurants that offer conference specials, car and sports equipment rental operations, etc. How can you make that example work for you?
Join newsgroups that relate to your product, or that relate to your beliefs and post information. ‘lways be positive and helpful and include a signature in your e-mail with a link to your site.
Talk to sites that offer complementary services about cross promotions or co-promotions.
What about search engines?
Search engines are an important factor of course. I’m just saying that you can’t rely on them alone for your success. Every search engine has it’s own system of indexing and ranking sites. Each wants to be just a bit different to stay competitive and so these systems are in constant flux.
For example, the wildly popular Google uses page ranking and relevancy as part of it’s strategy. One of these is to scan the site for sets of key words and phrases that it matches to key words and phrases on other sites.
Let’s say your site is about Opera. The more you use the word Opera throughout the site and the more times other sites link to your site using the word ‘Opera’ in the link the more your ‘relevancy’ increases. The more links you get funneled into the Opera page from other Opera sites the higher value your ranking returns.
Pay attention
This is great information before you start swapping links with other sites. Why? Because a huge list of links to your site. doesn’t help you much unless all those links have relevancy. This is why so-called ‘link farms’ don’t work very well. There may be a thousand links, but if they are all from sites that don’t relate, or use less relevant content, your ranking will decrease.
Knowing this has tempted many to try to find a way around the system. They create ‘Doorway’ pages that funnel links to your pages. Have you ever done a search and all you got was dozens of links to the same site only to find there was little value in the content when you got there? This can happen with doorway pages. Several of the search engines have found ways around these tricks and will penalize sites discovered using them. Just don’t do it.
The bottom line is that there is no easy way to shoot to the top of the search engines and stay there. It’s hard work and needs constant maintenance to keep up to date with the latest search engine strategies. There are ethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts out there who can help with this, but take a long hard look at their plan before you hand over your credit card.
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