Every website, big or small, needs to ensure that it stays on top of its competition. The biggest concern of any website owner should be marketing their website successfully in order to make guests maintain a positive interest in the site or service. Here are 5 tips to help increase your site's traffic flow and gain those important return visitors. |
1. Advertise - It is important that you make sure everybody knows you have a website. Word of mouth advertising is the most effective way of improving sales and gaining return visitors. Printing your web address on everything from business cards to brochures and placing links to your site elsewhere on the web ensures that your site gains maximum exposure. Try contacting other websites of a similar nature to yours and negotiate a banner exchange. You will be surprised at how many visits you can receive from advertising this way!
Write articles for e-zines (Electronic Magazines). If your articles are informative and well-written, you may find that readers will enlist your services because you are knowledgeable in the field. Remember to attach a small signature to your article with some contact details and a link to your website. E-zine readers will steer clear of heavily advertised articles so try to make it sound as sincere as possible. Why not start your own e-zine or mailing list?
2. Free - It's a powerful word. Giving away something valuable for nothing on your website is an excellent way to entice traffic. A person's visit gives you the opportunity to impress them with other special offers and hopefully interest them in your services.
3. Offer Great Content - Nothing keeps a return visitor more than constantly updated and informative content. Make sure to update your site often but remember that not all pages will need to be updated all the time. A page which is visited every day will no doubt need new content every day. Similarly, areas of your site that are visited infrequently need less attention. To avoid wasting your valuable time it is important that you know where these key areas are. AbsolStats can help by making this information available to you.
For a visitor, a site that is always on top of the news and latest with content is worth revisiting and, combined with a friendly user-interface, you can be certain that many of your interested visitors will be placing your site at the top of their favourites list!
4. Design - An important factor in increasing your site's appeal is the way it appears. You don't need a degree in art to make your website look good - find a colour scheme that works well (typically 2 or 3 major colours), choose a readable font (Arial or Verdana are good picks) and font size, and most importantly, keep consistency. Think to yourself, "If I were a visitor, would I like my design?". If you put a bit of effort into keeping your website nicely formatted and easily navigable, you will reap the rewards of your well earned return visits.
5. Search Engines - Register your site with search engines and benefit from the visits you receive from this method. Many search engines run a spider which automatically indexes your website and ranks it depending on various factors, a major one being the words contained in the body of your site. Should you use the <meta name="KEYWORDS" content="..." /> tag? Only one major search engine uses the tag to index sites, but you can include it anyway for reference.
Article By: Lawrence Cawood