Website content is the heart of a site, it is made up of the text on the page as well as the images and
videos and of course the structure the web site. The best way to build a relationship with your potential customers is to provide valuable and useful content if you can’t provide value, why would they want to come back.. The way your site looks when viewed is crucial to potential conversions but the nature of your content is essential to get the people there in the first place.

The top methods of getting traffic to your site are advertising such as pay per click and search engine optimisation.

Search engines are competitve in terms of the way a site is ranked, however since they account for over 90% of all traffic we have to join the competition if we want to get a significant amount of traffic. Bearing this in mind, businesses which are interested in gaining a share of the online market have to be committed to achieving top 10 rankings for the keyword phrases which relate to the products and services they are offering.

Many individuals believe the best way to obtain a return on your investment in on line real estate, your website is to take up the services of a company specialising in search engine optimisation. It is true that as a one off this is the best way to get top rankings, however what happens 6 months down the line when they have been to visit your top competitor who paid a little more than you. It is important that you also understand what they are doing, either gaining the knowledge yourself or bringing it into your company so that top rankings can be maintained over time, the alternative of course being to retain the expert services on an ongoing basis.

Personally when I work on a clients web site I don’t recommend optimisation on a one off basis since optimisation over time allows data to be collected relating to site performance and in particular relevant keywords. There are a numerous companies helping website owners get people coming to their site using organic search engine traffic. These are the search engine results where you don’t have to pay for the rankings, you are selected as top by the search engines based on the quality of your site.

Pay per click advertising is the fastest way to get web traffic by paying for advertisements on search engines,which appear alongside the search engine results. This method allows you to select the keywords you believe people who are likely to buy might be using. Unfortunately you can’t guarantee they will click nor that they will like what they see when they reach your site. This is where you have to monitor conversion. Conversion is the rate at which visitors make the decision or "convert" into customers.

Pay per click systems such as google have a built in system for monitoring conversion, they aren’t perfect of course as they may not fit exactly into your site design but they do make it a lot easier. By giving you an indication as to whether the campaign you are running is resulting in sales you can decide whether to increase the budget or change your advertising to something which might work better.

Obviously the more money you are willing to pay the more people you can get to visit your site since you have to pay for every click someone makes. Bear in mind however if you don’t set a budget you could soon end up with a bill much higher than the cost of a professional web site optimisation service.

Unfortunately there is no best way to get traffic to your site. however, search engine bots will crawl your site once it has been found and look for good quality unique content more than anything else. You may think this means nothing if you are intending to run a pay per click campaign, but you would be wrong. The cost of a click is dependant upon the relevance and content of your site based, for example; in the case of google adwords, on the quality score.

Search engines are designed to always provide the best results for their users, in this way their users are more likely to come back and use their service again. I hope this answers the question posed initially for you, if it doesn’t I shall now make it clear.

Your website content is important and should not be skimped upon, always offer value and people will come back time and again.

Paul Palmer

I’d love to hear about your experiences in SEO and PPC please leave a comment but if you want a reply please contact me on facebook as I have found the emails left here often don’t work for some reason.

What makes an excellent web site?

You need a site with a significant amount of traffic, acutal people not just search engine bots. A high quality server is essential to establish a rapid loading time and a significant amount of desirable unique content. Successful companies making most out of internet web site marketing employ a range of strategies to make their online business thrive.

Internet web site marketing begins with a relevant keyword rich domain name. Just you choose your brand name carefully, so your company domain name will help put you at the top of the list in the search engines.

The domain name you register must be easy to remember and preferably appealing to pronounce as part of your internet web site marketing strategy. It could cost you dearly if the name is a premium domain, but if its right the extra cost could be worth it. Alternatively you could consider a unique combination of names allowing you to select to a low cost domain name to register.

A couple of advantages of internet web site marketing is the interactive nature of the internet as well as the ubiquitous presence. Clients purchasing online can get what they need easily and privately without worrying about personal interaction. A deal can be completed discreetly without too much social interaction, although this may not be a good thing

To keep a good ranking you need to consider how keep the level of traffic up on a web site, you can use a range of methods with tangible and intangible items provided you are offering them a reason to visit. Site membership is often used, with a nominal payment up front. However this is not an easy option since it may discourage them from coming to your site in the first place.

Marketing your web site can become costly where you need to maintain a secure membership system. The most popular type of membership site is a forum since it provides a means for members to share and contribute to the site content while embracing their interests not just yours.

Unfortunately this is not the only area to consider when planning your internet web site marketing campaign. The rank of a site not only depends on what is on the site but also which other sites link to yours as well as their popularity. To show up on a search engine at a reasonable position it is important to have a linking strategy which shows the search engine spiders that your site is respected sufficiently by others to want to send people to it.

How do you know if you are doing a good job in setting up your internet web site marketing campaign? Do you wait and see if you get sales and then change something if you don’t get any orders? Of course not you have to monitor the amount of traffic coming to your site.

There are free systems such as google analytics to monitor the source of your visitors and how long they spend on your site. Sometimes however this isn’t enough to allow you to optimise your internet web site marketing campaign. There are a number of commercial packages available however most hosts also provide a system which just needs activating to start the capture of data. You must remember though monitoring data is only of benefit if you use it and improve your site accordingly.

Paul Palmer

Social networker, dancer and all round fun guy.

What makes a blog stick in your mind, I did really mean the cutest blog on block but maybe the analogy isn’t really that clear. By cute I really mean attractive, making people want to come back to see more of what you are writing about. Obviously a blog is somewhere that you post short, interesting regular updates rather than long articles which you should put in an article directory. Finally the block well I do feel this is probably the most obvious, by block I mean niche.

The cutest blog on block on your block is therefore the one which ranks highest, gets the most natural traffic and what is most important the highest number of repeat visitors as well in your niche. Have you ever considered the traffic and why its all new from various sources, or maybe you have the opposite issue you only get repeat business. It’s the nature of the blog.

Creating a successful blog is not simply about putting the most content up online, its about getting the traffic there, (the people) as well and providing a quality service which makes people want to come back. If you have a hundred subscribers interested in your product which is maybe consumable or needs buying regularly you can be better off than 500 one off purchases.

You have to think about your tribe, about the kind of people who might be interested in your blog and want to read it, after all if no one is intersted in reading what you have written you might as well not have bothered in the first place.

Paul Palmer

Think about your blog is it the cutest blog on block, the top resource in your niche?

Why is it getting traffic to a site can be so difficult at times? How do people find a site online, what do you do if you want to find something new, a product you have never looked for before?

Google it maybe, or do you use another of the top search engines such as Yahoo, MSN or AOL, these are some of the routes to getting traffic to your web site too. However with the advent of Web 2.0 there are now many alternative paths real people like you and me can use to find your site.

There are numerous banner and traffic exchanges such as www.hitjb.com which for a little time and effort will help you in getting traffic to your site. They use categories to ensure that the traffic provided will be relevant to ensure that it is good quality traffic.

What is good quality traffic? If you are getting hundreds of hits but no result then you are probably getting traffic to your site which is of a poor quality. It is much better to get targeted high quality traffic to your site, but how?

It is actually much easier now than ever to get high quality targeted pre-qualified traffic to a web site. Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have made it easier than ever to build a tribe and bring focused, individuals who are your potential customers.

You will find a lot of advice here on my blog, and I will be publishing more so subscribe if you’d like to know how web 2.0 will help in getting traffic to your site.

Paul Palmer

Bringing you traffic in the social marketing environment