Increase Traffic to Your Website: a
101 Refresher
Every day the importance of your online presense increases.
Yet every day the difficulty of distinguishing your online presense from
your competitors' increases too. Add to that the bazillions of megabites of
unrelated online data standing between you and your customers and you might
find yourself on the last page of a Google search every time. So what's a
business to do?
Well, firstly, if all this cyber stuff is still newish
territory for you, read on for a better, albeit basic, understanding. If
you're already well versed in selecting keyword phrases, analyzing metatags
and other SEO processes, however, then the following might bore you to
tears. (Although the clever writing alone promises to make it well worth
your five minutes.) Here goes:
You absolutely have to have a decent
website. You could run the most creative Superbowl TV spot in history
directing viewers to your website. But if your site is crummy, every one of
the 100 million viewers who dial it up during halftime will click to
something else faster than a kid with ADHD on a half-pound of M&Ms.
And by "decent website," we mean everything from the
look and navigation to how fast it downloads, the quality of information,
and those aforementioned keywords, metatags and other SEO stuffs. There are
so many avenues to acquiring a snappy and functional website out there,
from free do-it-yourself online tools to the sky's-the-limit paid design
and programming, that there is no excuse anymore for a business website to
be anything less than stellar. Plus, nowadays an attractive,
well-functioning site doesn't have to cost a million bucks.
Provide backlinks to your website
everywhere you can and as often as you can. A backlink is simply
an online post containing your website address somewhere other than your
website itself. This is where blogging comes in; press releases; social
networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+; bookmarking sites;
question-answer forums; and lots more.
Most are free and pretty simple to master once you get the
hang of it. And big brother Google is out there 24-7 crawling the Internet
for new information that winds up on its pages of search
results--information that can be about you and that leads folks back to
your website. Do you have to contribute to all the available social media
types and online forums? No, but the more you do and the more times you do
it, generally, the better your results.
We recommend starting with a company Facebook page because
chances are you already have a working knowledge of how Facebook works,
compliments of your personal page. From there, you can move on to LinkedIn,
Twitter, Google+ and on and on. But don't stop there. Posting to pages
hosted by others can be a very effective online marketing technique too.
Intelligently conversing with followers of other companies and
organizations can entice those browsers over to your website.
One caveat to the concept of "more is better,"
however: Constantly hammering home messages about the quality of your
widget or that it's on sale this week for 99 cents gets boring fast. Worse,
it can also turn people off to your product or service. For the most part,
people want to be educated with solid non-salesy information, or
entertained. The more creative communicators educate, entertain, or both,
while subtly selling as well. But that's for another edition of Can't Touch This.
Do your search engine optimization
(SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) due diligence. Much of optimizing
your website in an effort to get it to appear on the first page of results
in a Google search (SEO) happens automatically by following 1 and 2
above.
Can more be done? Most certainly. There's optimizing the text
on your website so that it contains the words folks typically search for
(keyword phrases), which Google demands; adding lots of photos, which
Google loves; and even naming those photos with your keyword phrases,
instead of how we typically name them like "Photo 1" or by the
date it was taken, etc., which Google isn't at all interested in.
The list of what the Google spiders that crawl your site love
to see on it just goes on and on the deeper you drill. And what Google
likes, will get you closer and closer to the front page of her search
results.
Up until this point, if you do it all yourself, the cost to do
so is only your time. The final ingredient, SEM, will cost you, though. SEM
involves paying a company to procure space at the top or down the side of a
Google results page where your website listing will reside no matter what
the organic results of a search dredge up. That's not to say that if the
phrase "ice cream cones" is searched for, your meat packing plant
will appear at the top of the page, but you get the picture. Then, every
time somebody clicks on your listing, you're charged a fee (aka "pay
per click").
You also get all kinds of analysis about who's clicking on
you, how many pages they're viewing, whether they came to your site
organically or via your paid presence, as well as all sorts of innovative
tracking and marketing programs. If you're a whiz at SEO, you might not
need to undertake an SEM campaign. However, the two combined can only help.
Shameless Plug. At some point,
unless you've got the mind of a Stephen Hawking, the patience of Job, and
the time on your hands of a prison inmate, you'll likely want to hand off
some or all of this to an expert. If and when that day comes, please give
us a ring. At Ryan William's Agency, we've got your back.
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