Online Traction

This is the first in a series of articles on strategies and tactics to attract pre-qualified traffic to your website. The advice is a mix of how to attract the right traffic, how to convert this traffic into a steady stream of customers and how to out-maneuver your competitors.

Some of the steps will yield fast returns while others are focused on the longer term. Its in summary form so contact me if you need more detailed information or advice on any of the information I provide here.

Before you begin you need to know that online marketing is a constantly changing field in many ways. It used to be the case that you could just put up a website and wait for traffic. These days the only way to stay competitive in most industries is a more proactive approach towards keeping your site active, well-linked and visible in search engines. I strongly suggest you sign up for my newsletter; this way you can stay informed of new trends that may directly affect your business.

1. Get familiar with your website metrics

…set a baseline and watch your traffic trends and fluctuations over time

…see where your traffic comes from - does your traffic come from searches or advertising or other websites?

…see what pages of your site are performing for you - are visitors behaving as you’d expect, is your target content being read?

…see what keywords and keyword phrases (and their variations) yield most visitors and conversions
…see how long visitors spend on your site - most visitors jump between sites and generally decide very quickly whether your site is more/less useful than that of your competition.

This may sound boring but it really is important. Identify where your most profitable traffic is coming from and use this information to adjust marketing spending in that area. For example, you may find that your newsletter is a great source of traffic, or your Google Adwords Campaign. For more detailed information on how to do this and the rationale read my previous post on the subject. The most important thing to remember is that ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’.

2. Know your competition

…and what they are doing on the web. Do the obvious: visit their sites and compare them with your own. How do they compare with yours for content, ease of use, usefulness? Run the following test to see what sites link to your site and those of your competition (this directly affects your search engine ranking) link:www.insert-your-site-here.com - run this in google.com. Then run the same test for your competitors. All those inward links are a potential source of traffic to their site. Consider contacting those sites to link to your site.

Now imagine you are a potential customer of your company and you want to find your site. What search terms or phrases would you use. Where do you rank compared to your competitors when you do a search for those terms and phrases in a search engine? Run a quick (reality) check on googlerankings.com

3. Make it easy for prospects to contact you
Use a prominent toll free number and contact form. If you update your site frequently consider using a newsletter service, RSS or news syndicator feeds. These tools help aggregate content (e.g bloglines.com) and encourage recurring visits to your site. Not only are they a convenience (it helps information overload) for many users but also improves your page ranking in search engines.

4. Submit your site to search engines and directories, particularly local listings.

For example, click on the following links to “suggest” your site on Yahoo, Google, and MSN. These are the larger search engines comprising about 80% of search traffic in 2005.List your site in the biggest online business directories (good for improving your page ranking): Yahoo, ODP, Google, MSN, Skaffe, Joeant.com.

There are hundreds of others of varying quality. Consider also local and regional directories and listings. For example, if your business is in Jersey City, New Jersey list your site in that category of the directory and not under lawyers, realtor or whatever your business happens to be. This helps your ranking by improving both relevant searches and traffic volumes. This is not going to rapidly increase your page rank but is essential for the longer term visibility and ranking of your site.

5. Be SPIDER friendly!

A ’spider’ is a software program that traverses the web searching for web pages to ‘index’. All the top search engines use this technology to tell them about new web pages or updated pages. They look for text and follow your site architecture to find your pages. These programs have their limitations though. It follows then that if your site architecture is broken or hidden in javascript that your site is sub-optimal from a search engine perspective.

Also, search engines cannot see text that is contained in images or animations. That means you should avoid pages that only contain Flash or only contain graphics, because the spider is looking for meaningful text. And lots of it.

Use keywords (those words and short phrases that capture the essence of your business) throughout your content, especially in the front page, and in the html (title, keyword tag, description tag, alt tag). If you use graphics, make sure that ALT text tags are included. Make sure your html description is unique for each and every page of your site. Don’t use frames. Ever.

Avoid any kind of log-in page or splash page as the first thing a viewer or the spider encounters and search engines place most value on an informative, well architected, fast first page that is rich in keywords.

Use a search engine spider simulator and see your page the way a spider will see it.

Conclusion

Your online strategy should be a blend of ‘onsite’ optimization, competitor analysis, normal business intelligence about your website performance and spending, and proactive marketing initiatives.

If you use your site as a sales or marketing channel then you should consider all of the features mentioned above as well as those in the next article in this series. Importantly, keep abreast of the more important changes in this relatively new field as it evolves. Doing so will could give you significant and sustainable competitive advantage.