My life basically is attracting people to my clients’ businesses. Part of my life since 1996 has been building website traffic. During which time I’ve been part of efforts that utilize probably every way to build traffic that exists. There are dozens of ways to build web site traffic. But fundamentally, there are three ways to build traffic on your site:
- Find and use the right domain name
- Pay-per-click (PPC)
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
1. The right domain name describes what you do, not the name of your company. It should include the search terms people use to search for companies like yours. For example, let’s say you own Johnson Technology and you make flow meters. Your first inclination is: johnsontechnology.com or maybe johnsontech.com. Except your potential customers aren’t searching on any of those words. People who want to find you search on “flow meters” or “flow meter for steam pipe” or whatever. So, flowmeter.com or flowmeters.com or flowmetersforsteampipes.com are much better choices.
It’s really as simple as that. Search engines use several criteria for measuring the relevance of your web site to a particular search. Whether your domain name includes any words used in the search term is a basic yardstick all the engines use. All other things being equal on a search for “flow meters,” the flowmeter.com site gets returned far higher than the johnsontechnology.com site.
2. Pay-per-click, as you probably know, describes an arrangement you make with services, other websites (usually portals), search engines and directories. You bid on key words and phrases that relate to your product, your website is returned when someone searches on those words or phrases based on your bid, and you are charged only for those people who click through to your site.
If you have $1,000 or less to spend per month bringing people to your site, use pay-per-click. I recommend Yahoo Search, Google Adwords and MSN (Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions), that’s really all you need to know, as they cover 70+% of all the searches conducted on the Internet. Once you’re doing okay on these, start looking for related portal sites that offer pay-per-click.
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/
https://adwords.google.com
http://advertising.microsoft.com/home/home
Just go to each site and follow their instructions. If you want help selecting the words and phrases to bid on or writing the small ads, contact a person like me.
3. If you have $1,500 to $3,000 to spend per month bringing people to your site, use the PPC solution above and find the best SEO guys you can. SEO works to return your URL in the non-paid results. SEO guys sniff at us pay-per-click advocates, saying that people pay more attention to the non-paid results that the pay-per-click results. They may be right, although I haven’t see proof of that. Plus, if you can’t afford the price of admission, who cares.
Do numbers one and two. Right now. You can be up and going in a matter of hours. After you’ve been successful there, consider number three. If you need help, email me.
