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Editor’s Note: This is the last of a three-part series focusing on your company’s
Web site. Today we’ll discuss four major components of driving search engine traffic to your site.
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It doesn’t take a magic wand to drive search engine traffic to your Web site. Following Grow Sales’ four guidelines could help optimize your site’s search engine performance. |
E-commerce is all about driving traffic to your Web site and writing business. The old adage of “you never get a second chance to make a good first impression” seems to hold especially true for Web sites. Part I of this series was about getting this right. Part II covered the immense sales benefit of link tracking. Now we’re going to discuss getting people to your site in the first place.
A lot of Web site traffic is generated through search engines. If your company’s important services and products rank highly on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL, you will get a lot of page views. (As of this writing, these four sites rank #s 1, 2, 10 and 11 respectively, in terms of Web traffic. Source: Alexa.com)
There’s an important caveat to keep in mind when you’re trying to optimize your Web site’s search engine performance: Search engine optimization (SEO) is more magic than science. Search algorithms are constantly changing and as soon as you make progress in one area, it seems you go backwards in another. Despite the volatile nature of SEO work, following these four guidelines will help drive search engine traffic to your Web site for the foreseeable future.
1) Create external links to your Web site
Popularity is important on the Web. Search engine bots count the number of links to your site from other sites. A Web site with 1,000 external links pointing to it will be deemed significantly more relevant than one with only 10. This means you should pursue all reciprocal link opportunities with other companies, as long as there’s a credible business reason to do so. One of the better ways to create a lot of links to your site is to send out frequent press releases via an online PR distribution service. When your releases post, valuable links will be created to the source, which happens to be your site.
2) Use search engine-friendly page titles
Search engines determine content relevance in large part by page titles. Make sure your Web page titles are relevant to the services you’re trying to sell. Don’t make the all-to-common mistake of putting your company name on every page of your Web site. This won’t help people searching for “sheet-fed printing” or “mechanical binding” land on your site.
3) Increase Web site traffic
Search engines deem sites with lots of traffic more important than others with low activity. This is a catch-22, analogous to landing a first job out of college where employers want experience. If your site doesn’t have much traffic, it’ll descend further into the depths of irrelevance. One way to generate traffic is to do it the old fashioned way: pay for it. Hey, get your mind off of Elliot Spitzer; we’re talking about Google Ad Words! When people see your ad and click on it, they will be linked to your site and recorded as a site visitor. Don’t worry about onerous costs: Google, Yahoo! and the others allow advertisers to easily cap daily spending amounts.
4) Write search engine-friendly Web page text
Search engines scan text on Web sites and look for repeating words. Unfortunately, extreme search engine-friendly text barely sounds like English. Start with well-written copy that’s to the point. During copy review sessions, consider tweaking a word here and there, but it’s better to prioritize impressing visitors than search engine bots. Or, at least we at Grow Sales think so. Warning: Don’t put hidden text at the bottom of Web pages. Search engines severely penalize companies that do this.
A couple of more points:
- Flash-only sites look great. No doubt about it. However, they cause a couple of problems. First, since search engines can’t read Flash page text you’ll completely forfeit points on #4. Second, Flash-only sites can’t have tracking links applied to individual pages. Unless you make the services portion of your Flash site html, you won’t be able to create a selling “road map” as outlined in part II of this series.
- Meta tag effectiveness is debatable at this point. Our feeling at Grow Sales is that they certainly don’t hurt, so we put them in. One good use for Meta tags is to drive misspelled searches to your site. For example, creating a Meta tag for “stocastic” makes sense on a stochastic printing page.
What Can Grow Sales, Inc. Do for You?
At Grow Sales, Inc., we specialize in finding the right marketing mix for each client, and making sure the plan is properly executed. Since 1996, we have provided marketing, public relations, Web and graphic design and sales support to graphic arts clients nationwide. Think of us as your outsourced sales growth department. With our help, this could be a banner year for you and your company.
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