The winning formula for generating greater attention for your site and attracting visitors keeps transforming as the rules of the Internet game change. What once were staples of every successful online enterprise...
The winning formula for generating greater attention for your site and attracting visitors keeps transforming as the rules of the Internet game change.
What once were staples of every successful online enterprise, things like a skillful use of a signature file in e-mails or heavy reliance on newsletters, are now being questioned as effective tools and challenged by emerging limitations. Key components of any powerful site, such as attractive design and wanted content, remain and are bound to remain top priorities in the future, but they are increasingly in need of orchestrated traffic-boosting support. This is what can be done to optimize your site.
1. Search engines are king and it's best to live by their rules. Traffic from organic user search in Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others makes up the majority of visits for most sites, reflecting how strongly people rely on search engines to provide them with straight answers to their queries. Since these queries are based around specific keywords or phrases that sum up what Internet users are looking for, it's essential to identify which expressions best capture your services and make it as easy as possible for search engines and – in consequence - future customers to associate these expressions with your site. Try to find balance between positioning the content on the site and keeping it readable and natural.
2. Try walking in your customer's shoes. This refers to pinpointing the most effective keywords that customers might hit in search engines while seeking the services your company would be more than happy to deliver. But it also refers to designing your site and arranging information on it in ways that resonate with your customers' needs. Make sure the site content is informative and relevant, with even the tiniest details like zip codes in place. All critical information for customers, especially from the service section, should be featured and easy to find, including FAQ or map links.
3. Give visitors a reason to stay and return. Having an interactive application or a feature that keeps people coming again and again to your site can greatly enhance results. Even with a small thing – a mortgage calculator or some kind of unique ranking, the impact on traffic can be long-lasting. It can also help to translate vast volume of visits into longer visits, in a way translating quantity into quality, which is a desirable development and a better indicator of how appealing the site is for guests.
4. Join the ecosystem of online communities and leave traces by linking to your site. Not only will they boost your prominence in search engine rankings, which use links to index websites, but it will also raise your profile among other users. Being active on social networking sites or quality blogs has loads of viral potential that can carry the good vibe around your company from mouth to mouth. If you or your employees become trusted contributors to Internet communities, it will be easier to use this natural authority to drive traffic to your business.
5. Adopt a hybrid approach to spreading the news about your company and your products. Don't write off old-school methods such as sending out regular newsletters or appending URL to company e-mails – they still click with the vast majority of Internet users and translate into spikes in traffic. To keep up with changes and to please search engine algorithms, start a blog, encourage to sign up to your RSS feeds and set up profiles on major networking services. On top of becoming powerful channels of information dissemination, they will boost your standing in page rankings, making you more visible in searches.