Drive Traffic To Your Web Site: 6 Tips
 By Amanda C. Garrett

If you have a Web site, then one of your primary goals should be to get more people to visit the site. More site visitors equals more awareness of your business, which should result in more sales and profits.

Try these six tips to get visitors to your site.

1. Concentrate on content
It all starts with content – after all, if there’s nothing of value on your site, there’s no reason for people to visit.

For starters, avoid building what’s known as a “brochure-ware” site. This is a site that’s nothing more than listings and descriptions of your products and services (like a brochure).

Strive to provide additional value-added content that will help educate site visitors about your industry. If you’re a personal fitness trainer, for example, include information, articles and links about all aspects of fitness, health and nutrition.

2. Update your content regularly
Just offering value-added content isn’t enough. It has to be updated regularly to keep people coming back. If visitors return several times but there’s nothing new, they’ll have no reason to come back again.

Online news sites follow this model, updating their content constantly throughout the day. While this probably isn’t necessary for your site, you should try to update some site content weekly or every other week.

This could be as simple as writing a short article offering useful tips to your customers and prospects.

Using the personal trainer example again, you could write a series of articles on proper workout techniques or healthy eating habits. Post a new article each week and let readers know when the next article will be posted.

3. Publish an e-newsletter
An e-newsletter can be used to “push” your new article out to readers and then “pull” them to your site via a link promising more detailed information.

Ask your customers and prospects for their e-mail addresses and opt-in permission at every opportunity. Be sure to only send your e-newsletter to those who have requested it or given you permission to send them e-mail.

4. Submit your site to search engines
Search engines are the method used by most Internet surfers to find the information they’re looking for. So you want to ensure that your site will appear near the top of search results when people are looking for information about your industry or products.

The first step is to submit your site so that the search engines actually know it exists. Various search engines have different methods of adding sites to their listings. Some listings are free and others (like Yahoo!) cost money.

The least expensive and most efficient method is to use a service that will add your site to many different search engine listings in one easy process. Addme.com and Ineedhits.com are two such services.

5. Optimize your site
After submitting your site to the search engines, the next step is a process known as search engine optimization (or SEO). This is the process of “optimizing” selected pages on your site so that when searchers use specific search terms, your site will appear high in their search results page.

A whole industry has sprung up to help companies with SEO. You can pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to an SEO expert to help you. But there are also some simple SEO steps you can take yourself.

The easiest thing to do is to write your site copy using specific keywords that prospects might use when searching for information about your industry. Use these words as often and as early on the Web page as possible.

A personal trainer, for example, might use words like health, fitness, exercise and nutrition liberally in his copy.

6. Market your site offline
Finally, don’t forget about the easiest and often most effective way to drive more traffic to your site.

Simply put, your Web site address should appear prominently in all of your marketing, advertising and printed materials: letterhead, direct mail postcards, Yellow Pages ad, signage, packaging and your e-mail signature.

(Posted September 2007)

>>Back to Focus Workshop