Need More Traffic? Optimize Your Website!

By: Rick Parrott, MCP  

Are you looking to the internet as an additional revenue stream for your business? Many companies are these days. Unfortunately, some small business owners believe all they have to do is post a webpage to the internet and sit back and watch the money flow into their bank account.

Sorry to disappoint you, but that is not the way it happens. Marketing is as important to the online business as it is to an offline business.

How are your customers going to find your website? Simple, you have to tell them where it is. You use your marketing strategy to do so.

Just like in your “brick and mortar” business needs customers your online business needs customers. On the Internet, we call it traffic. To be successful, you need focused pre qualified traffic.

Optimizing your website will bring qualified prospects to visit. Your conversion rates will be higher because your visitors will be interested in your products. Instead of creating interest, you only need to direct it to where you want.

So how do you get this wonderful traffic? You use technology to assist your marketing! Make those search engines work for you instead of against you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of creating the optimal environment for your business website. We are going to break it into these four steps.

1. Keywords and keyword phrases.
2. Optimization of the physical layout of your internet website. (Discussed in part two.)
3. Providing quality content. (Discussed in part three.)
4. Linking strategies. (Discussed in part four.)

Key Words and Key Word Phrases

Say you are putting together a website on horses. How are people going to find it? You got it, words and phases!

Sit down and look at your website. What is it really offering your customers? Is your website is about horses? What kind of horses? Arabians! Is it a history site or training site or both or neither?

Eventually, you define your site as one about the history and training of Arabian horses in Argentina.

Now you can generate a list of words and phrases to describe your site content. Enter your keywords into a search engine and determine how to combine them based on how focused you want the results.

For example:

Arabian (HITS=14,200,000)
Argentina (HITS=191,000,000)
Horses (HITS=45,400,000)
History (HITS=1,670,000,000)
Training (HITS=1,450,000,000)
Horse training (HITS=19,300,000)
Horse history (HITS=37,700,000)
Training horses (HITS=8,260,000)
History of Arabian horses (HITS=611,000)
Training Arabian horses (HITS=563,000)
Training Arabian horses in Argentina (HITS=112,000)

Putting these words together into key words phrases will help your customers target your website. The more targeted your keywords, the easier it will be for your customers to find you.

As you can see, when your keywords become more explicit, you get fewer returns from the search engines.

Search engines regularly scan websites to update their records.
High quality focused keywords and keyword phrases will help them index your website. Once indexed, your keywords will help direct customers to your website. This translates into increased sales.

Before you read part two, take time to identify keywords and keyword phrases for your website. In the next segment, we will take these keywords and imbed them into the structure of your page to increase the chances that your customers will find your website.


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