Getting a website is one thing... getting anyone to visit is quite another. Whichever way you use to encourage visitors to your site, it generally costs - if not money, then time - and lots of it.
You won't be seen unless you are returned quite high in the search results - few people bother to look past the first page. I just searched on Google on "gifts". There were 428,000,000 results. Sad really. 427,000,090 websites may never be seen!
How do you get visible? Use the following methods:
- Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This costs a lot but guarantees that your advert will at least be seen.
- Use an old domain name. It is believed that older domain names have more credibility with the search engines.
- Optimise your site. Decide which terms (or 'keywords') your customers are likely to search for and then ensure that those words are repeated frequently (but naturally)throughout your site content and meta tags. Optimise each page for a different keyword for maximum effect.
Try to choose keywords that don't return too many competing sites... BUT try to ensure that those keywords are still being searched. Wordtracker has a tool that revelas how frequently a term is searched and this is a good place to start.
- Use your main keywords in your domain name.
- Get other websites to link to you. If your site is really interesting, then people will link to you anyway. But therein lies the rub. In the early days, how do they know you're there? Desperate web masters are sometimes driven to purchase links, even though this policy is actively discouraged by the search engines.
- Get "reciprocal" links - that is, swap links with other sites, ideally in a related field because relevance is important. Current thinking is that reciprocal links are less effective than 'one-way' links as they don't serve as a unilateral endorsement of your site.
- Submit your site to directories and search engines in order to build links.
- Write articles and submit them to article directories.
- Advertise, both on and off the web.
- Mailshot. There are companies who will manage email campaigns on your behalf.
- Free Traffic. Also called Traffic Exchanges. Essentially you are required to look at other people's ads, in order to earn the right for them to forced to read yours. The problem here is motivation. We are not looking at the ads because we are interested, or because we want to. We are doing it because we have to in order to earn credits. Some systems work better than other, but I fear that it is wasting millions of man hours that could be better spent.
- CPA. Similar to free traffic, but here you are rewarded either in the form of cash or credits for completing an activity. At least in this instance, the participant has to actively engage with your site.
I have hardly scratched the surface, but this serves as an introduction to the subject of web marketing. I want to finish on a critical note...
There are vast numbers of scammers working on the net who will be quick to relieve you of your hard-earned dollar - and this is especially true in the search engine optimisation(SEO) and web marketing field . They are often sophisticated and highly plausible. Err on the side of caution. Check them out. Enter the name of the company or site, followed by the word 'scam' in the search engine and see what it turns up. That has saved me on several occasions.
