How to Drive Traffic to Your Website
You can have a professional website with amazing graphics and quality content. But unless you know a thing or two about search engine marketing, your website might as well not exist at all. At the end of 2008, there were an estimated 186.7 million websites on the internet, and that number grows by the thousands every day. Out of hundreds of millions of websites, how do you get people to visit yours?
The answer is a fairly simple concept called search engine optimisation, or SEO. Simply put, search engine optimisation is ensuring that your page appears high up in the list of search engine results when certain keywords are searched for. For instance, if you own a bicycle shop and someone is searching for “bicycle shop” in Google, you want your website to be as high up in the search results as possible.
So now you may be asking, how does one achieve this search engine optimisation? Well to begin with, it has a lot to do with the keywords that are found on your website. Again using the bicycle shop example, you would often want to use words like bicycle, bike, cycling, etc. on your site. You do this because Google sends “website crawlers” out to search the internet. What they are crawling for are keywords such as those located on your website. The crawlers pick up keywords from a website, and then they send the info back to Google. Google then categorizes your website accordingly.
Another way to gain website traffic is through Google Adwords. I know, Google does it all! Google Adwords are those advertisements to the right of the page after a search is completed. A few “featured” ads are usually displayed in the yellow box above the search results. For a fee, an advertiser can choose which keywords they would like to be associated with their website. They then create an ad, and when someone searches their related keywords, that ad will appear in the advertising section to the right. Other search engines, such as Yahoo and Ask.com, have followed suite and begun to use this feature. However, Google Adwords is the most popular and effective tool for search engine marketing.
Lastly there is link exchange, or banner exchange. This is mostly used for websites that are not of a business nature. You register your website with a link exchange network, and then you advertise for other websites of a similar nature. In exchange, the advertised website also advertises yours on their site. For instance, you have a bird watching website, and you register with a bird watching link exchange. You then advertise for other people with bird watching websites, and they also link back to your site. This is effective because when there are websites that link back to your site using those all important keywords, your rating in Google search (As well as Yahoo, Ask, etc.) goes up.
When you apply these search engine optimisation techniques, your website will be a force to be reckoned with. Work on building a high quality website with impressive content, and let Google do the rest!