5 Things That Will Improve Your Web Site Traffic (Plus 1 to Avoid)

By Dian Schaffhauser Oct. 9, 2007, 6:00am PDT 71 Comments

There are plenty of ways to generate attention for your web site, but you’ll also want to make sure you’re covering the basics too. We talked to web site marketing expert Celeste Bishop, who runs Bishop Market Resources, to learn what you can do right now, this week, to optimize your site.

1. Figure out what key words and phrases are going to be important to your site. Bishop suggests brainstorming to come up with a list of what you believe your prospects and customers would put into a search engine to locate your products and services.
Then run them through a tool such as WordTracker, the Google keyword tool or Yahoo Overture Keyword Selector Tool to see what the volume of search activity is and find alternative phrasing to add to your list.


Next, take each page that’s important to you — not the Contact Us page or Site Map — and make sure that keyword or phrase is used prominently. Use it early on in the text and at the end of the page. Put it into a heading with an H1 tag or a subhead with an H2 tag. But, she advises, “Don’t overuse it. Don’t change the way the content is reading, so it sounds ‘horsy.’ It’s better to have good content than have keyword phrases sprinkled in.”

Also make sure it appears in your metatags behind the page. Yes, metatags still have value — though not from a search engine ranking standpoint. “You have to think of a metatag as a kind of ad,” says Bishop. Search engines use that to show additional text as part of the organic listing. “If you’ve got a metatag that isn’t compelling and doesn’t have keywords in it, [people] won’t click through even if you do rank well.”

2. Make it your “career” to get links into your site. That includes getting links to more than just your home page and using your keywords as part of the anchor text. To get links, Bishop said, write articles and place them on other sites. Then make sure it includes a resource box or bio at the end of the article that includes your URL in the first line and something that will compel readers to go to your site in the second line, along with another link. (For example: Dian Schaffhauser writes for Web Worker Daily at http://www.webworkerdaily.com. Read her report on how to talk with your CEO about Web 2.0 here: http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/09/18/does-your-ceo-get-web-20/.)

3. Start a blog and participate in other blogs. These two go hand in hand. By “participate,” Bishop doesn’t mean leaving comments just to be able to include a link back to your own site. She means becoming part of the “ecosystem” of the community. “Over time the people whose blogs you’re commenting in will notice you and start making references back to you.”

The value of blogging on a reasonably consistent basis — aside from being able to share your expertise and opinions with the literate world — is that search engines will index your site more often. Bishop says small business sites, especially, can go for a long time without being indexed. Google does that by design. “They know that the site exists. It’s known as the Google Sandbox. But they want to make sure you’re not a pornographer or a bad actor, basically. You can get around that by having what are known as ‘authority links’ coming back to you.”

For example, if you’re writing about tennis, and you participate in the important blogs in the world of tennis, having those links coming back to your site would be regarded as authority links. “That’s a clue to Google to get you out of that sandbox,” says Bishop. “Links are the new gold standard in managing to get ranking on the search engines.”

4. Add something interactive to the site that will make people come back over and over. Bishop said one client, a high-end real estate finance organization, added a calculator where people can figure out how their taxes would benefit by doing something with the firm. “People come back repeatedly to use it.”

Besides being fun and having potential viral implications, interactive devices help your site to “get embedded in [visitors'] psyches,” said Bishop. “I constantly have clients tell me that the difference in their sales process from this is like night and day. People talk to them as if they already have a relationship.” This can shorten the sales cycle and reduce the amount of effort you have to put forward to build credibility with potential customers or clients.

5. Don’t worry about how many people come to the site but with how long they stay. That means focusing on those areas that will encourage people to hang out longer. To measure this, Bishop recommends Google Analytics because, although it has problems, she said, “it’s free.”

6. Forget about email newsletters. Bishop said problems with spam filters and firewalls are making this web site staple a waste of time. “You’d be better off having a blog that you put newsletter-type content in and have people subscribe to it with an RSS feed.”

What about those newsletter sites that promise to do everything possible to make sure your email gets delivered? Bishop said just because a newsletter delivery report has few rejections, that doesn’t mean the email is getting through to the subscriber. “They don’t measure it the right way,” she said. “I do test studies. Most firewalls won’t give you the courtesy of a bounce-back. It’ll look like it went through, but it gets stopped at the firewall.”

Have you learned a basic trick or two worth sharing?