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| Get More Traffic At Your Web Site
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| by David Ehrlich, President, Track Marketing Group |
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At this point, most everyone has a web site. Now, how do we motivate our prospects, clients and members to visit our site. In this article, we are going to cover 4 different ways to gain more traffic.
No matter which methods you choose to use, keep in mind that you will always need to provide a reason to visit. Simply saying, "visit our web site at www.xyz.org," is about as powerful as saying, "call us at 202-555-1212". People are far too busy to visit a web site without a good reason. What's in it for them to take the time to visit? We'll assume for now, that the site has unique and compelling content that offer people a reason to visit - what people refer to as a sticky site which is a separate topic we discuss in depth in a future article.
Try to think of things that people can do at your site, that will help educate, inform, or entertain them -- and ideally, that are unique to your site vs. others they can visit. For example, offering free stock quotes or the weather is not enough since they get that other places. However, if you cover news about companies in your industry and package the content in a unique way, you have added value. Once you identify selling points for your site, you'll want to increase traffic. |
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| 1. Top Positions in Search Engines
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| One of best ways to reach web surfers who may not be aware of you, is to develop a strategy for search engines. There are many things that will impact where you are positioned on the search engine results pages. Here is a list of items you may want to consider. |
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Start by brainstorming on the best single and combination keywords to describe your site. These are stored in "meta tags" in your html code and they tell most search engines about your site. Visit http://inventory.go2.com/inventory/Search_Suggestion.html to see what people are searching on relative to any single keyword. For an overview on keyword pointers, see http://www.gainwebtraffic.com/keywordpnts.htm. |
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After you have a list of 10 - 20 single and combination keywords, visit the major search engines and see how you score under each. This will provide you with a baseline to see how you move up as you add keywords and submit to search engines. |
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Add or update page description meta tags on your pages. These are what people often see as the description of your site once they see your site on a search results page. Are you selling your site and reinforcing some of your best keywords in the description? |
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Review your page titles - they should reinforce your best keywords and encourage people to visit the site. |
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Create doorway pages. These are simple single pages designed to be found in search engines and will direct people to your web site. They can be optimized for each search engine/keyword topic. |
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Once you have updated your pages, you should submit them to the major search engines and search directories. Yahoo is a directory and you manually place your site in 1 or 2 categories. Most of the others such as Excite and Google are search engines. Once you tell them you want to be included, they automatically "spider" your site looking through all your web page contents. |
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After the search engines review your site, you should notice much higher positioning for the keywords you have selected. This should result in more traffic. You can use software to help you track where people are searching and what words they used to find you. |
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| WebPosition is an off-the-shelf software product that will perform all of the tasks listed above including adding meta tags, creating doorway pages, reporting on searches, site submission, and analyzing where people are coming from. |
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| 2. Use Your Existing Promotional channels |
| add web promos to anything you're already distributing to your prospects, clients and members. For example, invoices, newsletters, renewal notices, meeting notes, etc. |
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| 3. Personalized Email Broadcast
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| using off-the-shelf software or an outside company, you can easily send a personalized message to your prospects, clients and members. One effective technique is to use their name in the subject line and the opening part of the body message text. For example the subject line could contain the opening text "Jim - check out this press release we will be sending to all members." This will get their attention and it looks like a personal email. WorldMerge by Colorado Software is very effective for sending personalized emails. |
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| 4. Color Post Cards |
| an ideal way to reach both your members and new prospective members is traditional direct mail. This offline to online promotion can be effective since the piece can be designed to get their attention and speak solely to why they should visit your web site today. Since there are many direct mail lists available for rent, this can be an ideal way to reach prospective members. |
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