I have a new website, where are all the visitors?

230,000,000 websites. According to a Netcraft web survey (2009), that’s how many websites you are competing with to get visitors to your site and new sites are being added every day.

My business is to create websites, so it’s not my goal to discourage anyone from having a website, however it's important to have a realistic view of the work involved in getting people to your site. Creating a beautiful website will not help your business if no one knows it is there. Remember those 230 million websites? It’s highly unlikely that someone is just going to stumble across your site while surfing the internet. Creating and launching the site is only part of the process. Ongoing promotion of your site will be a big factor in its success.

No Magic Formulas

increasing website traffic

Many people seem to think that there is some "magic" a web designer can perform to increase visitors to a website. It used to be adding keywords to the keyword tag. The largest search engine, Google, does not even look at keyword tags any longer. That's not to say that keywords, in your website content, are not important, but there's more to it than just popping some keywords into an html tag.

The current "magic formula" is social media. There's no doubt that social media marketing is a useful tool, but there's a lot more involved than simply setting up a Facebook or Twitter page and posting sporadically. The success of social media hinges on interaction with your friends or followers. That equates to a sizable time investment. Many small business owners may not be able to invest the time required for social media to pay off. More about that in future articles.

It sounds like I'm painting a pretty bleak picture here, but there are tried and true, common-sense methods you can use to increase traffic to your site. We'll explore each of these in more detail in future articles.

  • Keyword research and optimization - This involves more than just throwing some keywords into a meta tag. There are some "behind the scenes" places where the web designer can add keywords to the code, but it’s equally important to use the keywords in a natural context in the content of your website pages.
  • Links to your site – I can’t stress this enough. This is a huge factor, especially with Google. Their premise is that if your site has interesting and/or valuable content, there will be many other websites linking to yours. Think along the lines of Youtube.
  • Interesting Content – Think about your own web surfing habits. What sites do you visit often – and why? Then look at your own site objectively. Does your site have content that will attract visitors, hold their attention, and keep them coming back? I have been coming across the phrase, “content is king” repeatedly as I research internet marketing. Large sites with lots of useful information and frequent updates do well with search engines.
  • Offline marketing – Put your website url on everything you can think of, from your business card to the side of your car.

These are the core principals to increasing website traffic. I'll go into each of these more in-depth as well as other web marketing techniques in future articles.

 

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