MARKETSTORM NEWS AND ARTICLES

Traffic to your website is the key to success.
by Nick Fedaeff

If your business website lacks visitors - and even your employees don't know your web site address you are wasting an excellent marketing opportunity. So what are you going to do about it?

There are many ways to get people to visit your site, in internet terms we call it "organizing traffic."


First, your website has to be designed and set up the right way:

1. Your Home page (index page) must contain text. If there isn't any text on your home page - just a logo to click to ENTER (and we have seen that 1000 timesý) it simply won't work. Why? Some search engines only look for text on home pages of websites. No text, and you won't be found by anyone searching the net, its as simple as that. If your website is about marketing the first sentences of your home page should contain a healthy description of what marketing is all about as far as you're concerned.

2. Use an informative title that describes the website's content well.

3. Meta-Tags: Keywords and Description - make sure you have them - if you are unsure call us or search the net to find out what these mean. You must be proactive with all areas of your site and get to know the important things let the web builder fix it for you but give direction and ask questions. Search engines often pick up on this kind of hidden information so its important.

There are so many other tricks to make websites more searchable, and we use these when building websites for our clients. (call us 360 8683)

Remember, these tricks work only when using search engines like Google. It doesn't apply every time someone starts searching on the Internet Visitors may come to your site for other reasons. 80% come to websites directly by typing an address, clicking on banners and links, or selecting a site from a favorites list.

MORE TRAFFIC! MORE RECOMMENDATIONS:

1. Make your site useful and informative, so visitors learn something, will remember you, or tell someone else. I've spent five years running a website for the Russian community in Auckland. Now more than 300 web-pages in the world refer to my site, by simply publishing address www.russiannz.co.nz. I didn't pay any fees, I didn't even ask, but these sites included me - because they wanted to share useful information. This is the beauty of the Internet and it can be used to your advantage. If a link to your site appears often, you have more chances of getting people to visit. So - make press releases, inform website owners about your site. Someone's going to publish your address.

2. Banner advertising - this can be expensive. Normally banners are placed on sites with much traffic. It works the same way as real traffic on the road. On a busy street there's a lot of advertising, because so many people pass by to see it. If you're on a budget, place your banner on a XTRA MSN page (the most popular kiwi website) and pay maybe $3000-$5000 per week to get noticed - great if you have the budget.

3. Email marketing. With email marketing you can target groups or industries. Use your own email database, or other companies who can provide lists. Say you want to target all businesses in travel - reach travel agents by sending them emails - cheap and effective. So maybe only 0.5% of these will pay off - so what? It all depends on numbers. What would happen if you sent a million emails?

Is it SPAM?
It's tricky to say what SPAM is. If you're in business and a stranger emails you business news, you might actually find it useful. We get 100 emails from around the world every day. Most we delete, but the truth is - in amongst all the rubbish on Viagra and Home Loans, we get some good ones! If we had to choose between getting only messages from people we know, and receiving messages without filtration - we'd choose the second.

Which would you choose? Let us know, and we'll publish a simple report on it.