Rumours and conjecture spread quickly in web-design, and are often read or purported as fact: “Search Engine Optimisation is bad!” or, “You can guarantee attaining the number 1 spot in Google!” or, our personal favourite, “If you sign up for [insert popular service here] you’ll see a 40,000,000% increase in traffic!” Every day, thousands of innocents flock to websites of varying integrity to put in their URL and email address, hoping to get millions on their homepage in seconds and hoping to have found an answer to one of the most important, and commonly asked questions on the internet.
“Is there a sure-fire way to get traffic to my website?”
If we, or anyone, knew the answer, there wouldn’t be a veritable library of articles discussing the topic online, and we wouldn’t be writing this. If your website doesn’t get traffic, it may as well not exist to those who would potentially use it and to you as a business owner. Maximising the potential of your business online is a long and tricky process – getting conversions from that traffic even more so (although there is a train of thought that suggests 1% of 10,000 visitors is better than 10% of 100 visitors). Here then, is our list of 10 ways you can get traffic to your website:
1. Write cleaner code.
The cleaner, leaner your mark-up, the easier it will be for a search engine spider to digest, and the quicker your site will be crawled. Ensure your site validates to W3C standards and isn’t full of spacer images, inline scripting and redundant code, your site will be faster, take up less space, use less bandwidth, and Search Engine Spiders will be able to access that amazing content of yours a lot quicker.
2. Know your market.
Who are the big players in your market? Which upstart SMB is changing the way people think about your product or service? What are their unique selling points, and how do yours compete with theirs? We aren’t suggesting that you follow the market, but broad knowledge of those around you can only help in the long run: being aware of who you are competing with when you buy your text-ads is nothing but advantageous, for example.
3. Have a reason to be Number 1 in Google.
Everyone launches their website with the dream of being number one in Google, but very few websites actually have a reason to be number one in Google. Without good reason to appear as number one in Google, no site owner can reasonably expect to be number one – unless extreme good luck forms a significant part of his or her online strategy – and when we say “good reason”, we mean giving Google an actual reason, rather than “I want to maximise my sales potential”.
More often than not, if you give Google a viable reason to index you higher, it will, and it will prove a cheaper, less stressful means of achieving a high ranking than paying an SEO company to get you to number one through “alternative” means.
4. Advertise.
The old adage “It pays to advertise” is so intensely overused nowadays that it is easy to overlook the simple truth it portends, effective advertising will pay for itself and more. Advertising online is – quite rightly – seen as something of a minefield, but careful research can lead to excellent returns.
Advertising online can take many forms, we’ve already covered many of them in another article, so we won’t bore you again (you did read that article, didn’t you?), but a few of the more effective ways of advertising your business online:
- Content syndication
- Targeted Text-ads on a network of sites (Google Adwords is a good start)
- Unique partnerships with complimentary sites.
- Business or Consumer directories.
5. Use web services to their full potential and stay abreast of big developments.
In the process of writing and publicising this article, we’ve used four free web services directly and countless others indirectly via Feedburner. Just because they’re free doesn’t make them any less worthwhile than products you buy off the shelf, blogger is a more than adequate hosted blogging service with RSS capabilities. Feedburner adds all kinds of functionality to both blog and feed alike, and will alert other web services to your update at the click of a button. All functionality that could be custom-built (and sometimes needs to be), but for most purposes there is a free service that is more than adequate.
Staying on top of what new services are making waves online is a key component to any online strategy, being an early adopter of free services online never hurt anybody, as there’s no cost risk involved. The worst that can happen is that you waste as much time as it takes to sign up and try it out.
6. Update your content regularly.
The only way to keep readers – and search engine spiders – coming back to your site is to regularly update your content. Adding new articles; product listings; case studies; Frequently Asked Questions; product documentation; client testimonials; portfolio items; quick links or any other text-based content is a great start. If you want repeat-visitors to your site, or any kind of sustained traffic whatsoever, you have to give the visitor a compelling reason to return. Users are the web. Don’t cater for search engines, cater for the users.
7. Get Quality Inbound Links
Just as it pays to have your content regularly updated, it pays to have high quality inbound links to your site. The more links to your site from others (and the better quality the sites linking to yours), the greater the chance that a user and a search engine spider will end up on your site. A search engine spider will assign rank to your site based on the number of inbound links pointing to it, and the quality of those links (the reputation of the sites linking, essentially) – at the same time, a user is more likely to click a link on a high quality site.
8. Follow real-world business rules
In reality, you wouldn’t start a business, put it in the telephone book and then sit back and wait for the customers to roll in. Effectively, launching your site, letting Google index it and then assuming it will be successful is exactly the same mistake. In reality, you wouldn’t have last year’s products in your store for people to peruse. Failing to maintain your site with up-to-date content is tantamount to the same mistake. Although your website isn’t a constantly visible, tangible aspect of your business, it has the potential to be the biggest aspect of your business.
9. The 3 P’s: Practice, Patience and Persistence.
You won’t get any traffic to your website through hard work and industry unless you practice trying. Talking about succeeding with your website is a good start, but ultimately someone who has tried and failed to build traffic coming to their website is still more likely to get more traffic coming to their site than someone who has talked about being successful and done nothing practical. Practice makes perfect.
If you aren’t patient you won’t see any results because you’ll be rashly abandoning one technique in favour of another. Consider this: it can take eighteen months to leave the Google sandbox and be indexed as you should be for certain keywords. Those who have worked through the sandbox several times and observed the emerging patterns all suggest that patiently updating your content and getting inbound links is the key – the kicker is that you can’t see any gain for your hard work until the very end. It’s flying in the dark.
Persistence is the final P, and the most important. If you are persistent in your efforts, you will succeed eventually.
10. Don’t rely on one technique.
Remember the analogy of the business that opened, put its name and telephone number in the phone book and then just waited? If you’re reading this and know your website is relying on one thing, and one thing only for success online – Google eventually ranking you at number one for a keyword – then your strategy may as well be a roll of the dice (the odds aren’t even as good as 1/6), because you’re basing it around a massive stroke of luck that cannot be legislated for.
Spreading your efforts evenly across multiple techniques and analysing the returns from each will lead to the best results: shed methods that do not work and scale-up those that do.
If you want to find out more about getting traffic to your website, different Search Engine Optimisation techniques or any other facet of web-design, get in touch with Inventive Web Solutions today.
