What better way to start the new year than with more Traffic to your web site. Web Traffic is a critical part of your internet business and it is imperative that you design it to bring you the most amount of Traffic possible.
Designing your site for Traffic includes offering good content, easy navigation and a logical flow. Additionally you must also build your site to draw Traffic from the search engines because if you can obtain high search engine ranking, you can enjoy free Traffic.
It’s important to note, however that good ranking won’t do you much good without a well designed site and a well designed site can’t bring you visitors if no one knows it’s there. Both high ranking and good design need to work together.
How do we pull all this together? Let’s take a look.
-A Word About Design-
A huge mistake I see many website owners make is that they get caught up in making their site cute. They love the little animations, buttons and dramatic backgrounds. What they fail to consider is that these things are worthless if you don’t offer good content, easy navigation and a logical flow.
First of all don’t try to be everything to everyone. Design your site around a theme, preferably a niche theme. Don’t confuse your readers with links all over the page. Design a logical flow. Lead your viewers to where you would like them to go. Leave plenty of white space and keep your pages organized. Clearly state at the top of your pages what you are about and what you would like your viewers to do.
Secondly, I don’t recommend pop-ups. I find that the majority of internet users find them annoying. The demand for pop-up blockers is a good indication that viewers don’t want to see them.
Thirdly, offer good content. Provide information on your site that will help viewers solve a problem. Offer information that they might not get elsewhere. Write reviews regarding your products. Write newsletters and articles and most importantly offer something of value for fr?e. Give your viewers a reason to come back. It will also build trust in you.
-Traffic Builders-
Good search engine ranking can bring lots of visitors to your site. It often takes a few months to rank well but the payoff is lots of qualified Traffic. While it’s not practical to depend solely on search engines for Traffic it can complement your other advertising campaigns nicely. Aiming for high search engine placement is always a plus.
Keep these in mind when developing your site for the search engines:
- Domain Names
Choose a domain name that has your site keywords in it. For example, if you’re a site about pet care, try to include the words “pet care” or words related to pet care in your domain name if you can.
- Keywords
Keywords require research and there are several tools to help you out in this area. These are my favorites:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
I suggest focusing on only one keyword or keyword phrase per page of your website. This may not seem like a lot but if your site has 20 pages you can focus on 20 keywords. Each page should be considered a landing page for your site. If you have proper navigation on your pages, it will easily allow viewers to see everything you have to offer.
Include your keyword or keyword phrase at the top of your page as well as in at least one header phrase. Also work the keywords into the body of your text as often as you can without sounding redundant.
Your keywords should be in the Title tag as well as in your page description tag. Many search engines no longer look at the keyword tags, but I recommend using them and including the plural forms as well.
- Alt Tags
Search engines don’t index images, therefore any text on your site that is presented in image format won’t get indexed. To solve this problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site, fill in your ALT tags with your keywords. This will boost your keyword frequency and help your site achieve better ranking.
- Linking
Search engines will rate your site by who is linking to your site, so it’s important to establish quality, related links. This can be accomplished in a few ways. One way is to establish reciprocal links with other like sites. When exchanging links be sure to include your keywords in your site title.
Review the page you are exchanging links with. Be sure it is a site that you find easy to navigate and informative. I also recommend that the site’s index page have a Google PR rating of at least one. This ensures that the site is not being penalized by Google. If it is a penalized site then you could be penalized as well for linking to it.
- Include a ‘tell a friend’ and ‘bookmark’ scr?pt on your site.
This gives viewers an easy way to bookmark you and most of all return to your site.
- Include a Site Map
Site Maps let visitors know what information you have, how it’s organized, where it is located with respect to other information, and how to get to that information with the least amount of clicks possible.
Site maps also provide spider food for search engine robots. This can increase your chances of becoming indexed because a site map allows the search engines to easily visit every page of your site.
A site map works best if you include a link to your site map in the navigation of every page on your site.
Finally, don’t let your site become stale. I have found that my search engine rankings improve when I periodically add new pages to my site and keep the content new and fresh. Follow these tips and 2005 may be your year for Traffic.
About The Author
Elizabeth McGee has spent 20 years in the service and support industry. She has moved her expertise to the world wide web helping businesses find trusted tools, enhance customer service, build confidence and increase sal?s.
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Contemporary world situation as by november 2005
What has our world come to nowerdays?
It is now, that I begin to understand the complexity of world.
What the hack is Iran’s leader trying to accomplish by statements such as “We seriously need to wipe out Israel from maps”?
Not as if I’d personally care, but hey wait, isn’t that a bit offensive towards those Jews and whoever lives there?
From my point of view it is rather harsh.
Other countries object. Of course. I bed it is America (again) that will take action in order to protect the zionist country #1.
In other words: Iran is next, but only if the Bush administration and the right wing of conservative republicans get hold of the current affairs.
Affairs such as the CIA leak case. Why would a government or someone working for one of the mightiest countries ever give information about one of their agents to press? Doesn’t make sense on the first glimpse, but when digging deeper it does: The CIA agent’s husband, an ambassador stood up against the Bush administration sometime before the IRAQ war by saying that IRAQ did not attempt to obtain nuclear material in Niger (one of Africa?s states, hope I didn’t spell that wrong). Thus he objected to what America?s conquest of ruining Iraq?s reputation was trying to accomplish. In return, the US government leaked his wife?s agent status and thus ‘ruining her life’ (sort of I guess, seeing as she cannot work as a ‘secret’ agent anymore).
Some thousand miles to the east, back in Germany the political situation is still a mess. There is no stable coalition and therefore no stable government. Even weeks after the election it is still not sure who will fill which department slot. Now, at the end of october 2005, some politicians fully gave up on their work causing a national domino effect. From one day to another several high ranking personalities gave up. One of Germany?s major party, the social democrats substain a big loss as their head of affairs stepped down. What will happen now? Noone knows, but what we, the people, know is clear. It cannot continue like this. The gap between poor and rich is dramatically widening. The amount of poor people increases heavily. There are more and more intellectually challenged children and students. Anyhow, again lateshift has finished and I return back home to post this.
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