5 Things That Will Improve Your Web Site Traffic (Plus 1 to Avoid)
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://gigaom.com/collaboration/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?
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” 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.””
….so… when are you guys hiring? haha.
The only thing that newsletters have on blogs is that for the unsavvy internet user (IE, it’s 2007 and their just now getting their first computer, or moving to XP). blogs and RSS feeds are new territory. That and for some, email is just more practical. A good compromise to me would be to offer duplication. One of the things that I’ve been working on (along with a new site, wordpress, current clients, etc) would be setting up an SQL database that enable users to subscribe simply by sending an email to an address to subscribe, and one to another to unsubscribe, and a php form that does that without them having to even send emails. Then just duplicate the email on your blog. That way you’re covering both bases, and the end user can decide which medium that they want to view your content in. Once the initial SQL/pHp is set up, it really doesn’t take much more effort, just take it in to your digg submission/feed ping routine and voila’.
Even if you don’t agree with that at the end of the day, you know there are still going to be those clients that “want” one but not the other, at least with that approach you can maybe convince them to do both and add to your experience and repertoire.
I think No.5 is a big one. I know that I’ve concentrated on content or other things that might generate a buzz for a few seconds, but that quickly fizzle out. While the XXXX visitors a day might look great, when it’s XX the next, it didn’t really do much.
>> 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
The key to keyword research is putting yourself in your customers shoes and researching keywords that *customers* use, not yourself.
Here’s a free tool that takes a “root” keyword and generates a list of “buy” keywords to work with it.
You take the generated “power” keywords and use them in the 3 sites you’ve mentioned to check supply and demand.
Hope this helps!
Few more things you might consider:
1. Submit your business to Google Local and Yahoo Local. http://maps.google.com/ It is Free and the good part is once verified your website or your business will appear faster than the organic results. While you submit the site. Use keywords within the Title Of your Business. Instead of .” XYZ Business Name,City, State” consider : Keyword, State, City – XYZ Business Name” Because people will search for keyword rather than your company. Opening a wide audience. I have a posting here:
http://foxadv.blogspot.com/2007/04/is-your-business-listed-in-google-maps.html
2. Optimize your Content for Google Universal Search. The Blended Search Results from Google. Now you can see Video, Images, News, Blogs, Book Search all blended in search Results, You can use this as a good opportunity to optimize all of your content, Before you might only optimize your website, but now you got a plenty of room to optimize your contents, Video, Blogs, Images,{ Use Alt tags for images} For all of your content give a good Title, Description with keywords. Optimize your press Releases, include keywords, links in your press releases. When you write a post in your blog have keywords within your posts and link it to the related subjects or pages.
3. If you are selling Products consider alternative search engines and directories to submit. One of the effective and free shopping engine is Google Base, Its free and targeted right. Use those free tools. its easy
4. Write and give content, resources that might help your visitors.
5. Have unique Title, Descriptions for each page, instead of same title for all pages. Your About Us page should simply tell about you and your business and your contact us page should say how to contact you, Include Zip Codes in your contact us page. People search using Mobile with Zip Codes, so that you dont miss that audience
6. If you blogging consider tagging and submitting to Social networking sites and use keywords as tags to promote your business,
7. Check for proper HTML codes that allows spiders to easily enter and read your site, that is the first thing, if spiders cant access or read, its more likely your site wont rank. So check for standard HTML tags
Hope this helps, I have more to share but I will limit myself and look for more comments here
Thank you
Suresh
OK, so I like your site, but the following comment from someone you seem to trust, “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.”
I disagree.
99% of web users have email.
0.5% know, understand and utilize RSS readers.
Email newsletters still have a very BIG place in building traffic.
When any of my clients release a newsletter, traffic improves.
Instead, the better solution is to use the blog newsletter/RSS idea in conjunction with email newsletters.
Then, you kill two birds with one stone; but forget about email newsletters? That’s a little premature.
…wait a minute – maybe #6 was the one to avoid.
{sigh}
whatevers…
First, why doesn’t your comment field work in firefox with javascript turned off, I can’t even select it to start typing my rant.
The fact that I jumped over to IEtab to post this shows how strongly I feel that #6 is so very very wrong.
Celeste seems to make the same mistake so many other eary adapters do, just because email does’t work for one target market doesn’t mean it doesn’t work in another.
I have a cleint who regularly pulls1-2k worth of profits per mailing, which isn’t bad for a small photography studio. Her target market, busy moms in the suburbs of a mid-size, mid-west city, are not RSS users.
Echoing Chris’ comments:
Direct e-mail marketing is remarkably effective.
As long as keep your Spam Assassin score down and adhere to authentication standards such as SenderID and DomainKeys, your newsletter won’t be marked as spam. Re-directing users from a technology that everyone uses (e-mail) to one that relatively no one uses except for the very web-savvy (RSS readers), is lazy,and uninformed.
Also, looking at the HTML code on the home page Bishop Market Resources, I see 1999-era table-based HTML and tags wrapped in
</h1.What exactly is the bar for getting an article on WWD? Whatever it is, it might be time to raise it a few notches. This article is a poor offering on an otherwise fantastic blog.
The thing to consider is the market itself. If the research is accurate and true to your goal, you should stick to what shows the most promise. If you flip-flop and decide to go in every direction, wel, you will get a bunch of half results and almost theres. Listening to your customers will keep you ahead of the game and help your site stay away from the tail chasing , that comes from allowing your site to become an ego booster.
At Chris/Christian (Same person?)
It seems you and I are of the same thought, that newsletters shouldn’t be forgotten. You have the evidence to support it as well. I think this also brings up a point that sometimes “web” people we tend to forget how the rest operate. Further reiterating the point that newsletter+blog/rss is so easy to do, why not do both?
Does the author have a justification for dropping newsletters (other than they don’t think they work) that I am missing? it’s free to send email, takes two seconds to do. I just don’t see what the benefit to not doing it is.
While the idea of branding your site is very important, please make sure that you don’t over do it. It is very easy to get carried away with putting your business name and description of your company all over your site and thus causing search engines and worse yet, people, to think that you are trying to spam them with information. I know that when I show up on a site that has too much branding on it, I usually look the other way.