BitCom Affiliate Services

Getting Traffic

Without traffic your site won't succeed. It's really that simple.

Of course you may be a national or local business with a strong, well-known brand. In that case all you may need is a "brochure" site. You'll drive traffic to your site yourself or customers will search based on your brand.

But if you want to reach out to new customers and take advantage of the global marketplace then attracting that global traffic will require proper site design. When you have a properly designed site it will bring the world to your door.

How To Attract Traffic

The key to getting traffic to your online business is building a site that is attractive to the Search Engines. Of course you'll also need to build a site that is attractive to your visitors too. We'll cover that on our Finding Your Niche and Creating Credibility pages.

For your potential customers to find you your site must be listed high on the Search Engine Results Page or SERPs. That usually means on the very first page. Most searchers never make it to the second page (85% is the average). So convincing the search engines believe your site has value is the first step in having a successful online business.

Now remember there are two kinds of listings on the Google Results Page. There'sGoogle Search Engine Results Page organic listings and paid listings. The paid search listings appear in the first 2 or 3 positions on the left and on the positions on the right.

The organic, or natural listings as they are also called, appear on the rest of the page on the left. Eye-tracking and click studies have shown that these positions on the left receive the most clicks. And the fact that these natural listing are free also makes them an extremely effective advertising medium.

Getting Free Traffic

Some marketers say that the organic listings on Google may be the best value for your advertising dollar on the planet. Getting listed in the top 5-7 positions for a competitive keyword can mean thousands of visitors per day. Sometimes even more in a competitive niche.

Search Engine Optimization

Using techniques that make your site search engine friendly is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

For years many SEO "experts" spent their time trying to analyze the SE's algorithms. They could trick the spiders into thinking a site had value even if it didn't. They would overload a site with keywords and manipulate the page's code based on what they guessed Google was looking for. Sometimes it even worked.

But Google kept getting smarter and soon detected the tricks that these "black hat" SEOers were using. And they often penalized these websites by giving them poor rankings or not indexing them at all.

Today, any good site designer realizes you "can't trick Mother Google" so why try. After all, Google's only goal is to identify quality sites that have quality information. Their algorithms will get better and better until they can judge a site about as well as any human site visitor.

So the moral of the story is... just keep it real. Build a site that is valuable to real people and Google will reward you sooner or later.SEOers

Site Content Is The Key

If a site contains useful content and provides it's visitors a great experience not only will the Search Engines rank it highly but the real human visitors who really count will rank it highly too. That means they'll come back and also will tell others about it.

Great content also means other sites will want to link to you because they know it will provide their visitors a great experience. Over time the cumulative effect of this quality content and great link partners will be lots of free traffic.

But there are some specific techniques that web designers should use to generate traffic more quickly.

Most of these techniques are common sense.

Your site navigation should also be intuitive and easy to follow for both human's and Search Engine spiders. The easier your site is to navigate for humans the easier it will be for spiders. Also, consider your visually impaired visitors in your site design. Not only is it just plain kind, but remember that's the way Google "sees" your site as well.

Other techniques that can help increase your traffic.

For more specific information on getting traffic to your site visit our site marketing section. If you'd like some help getting your site optimized for maximum traffic you can contact us for a consultation.