The Traffic Snowball must be sticky!

OK so we have got our traffic snowball on its way down the hill but what we need to do is make the snowball nice and “sticky” so that it will grow and grow.

“Stickiness” can be defined as the websites ability to “cling on” to visitors. The longer the visitor stays then the more likely they will be to take up on what you are offering at your site. In this respect “content is king”.

Basically, the website must be interesting enough for people to want to stay. Graphics are OK but don’t overdue it. Concentrate on the content and the layout of the content on the webpage. If the page is too busy then a reader will become tired and will switch off and go elsewhere.

Headlines are fundamental, the first paragraph is crucial and there should be a ‘PS’, a ‘PPS’ and even a ‘PPPS’ at the end of the page if your text is selling a product or service.

Why ?

Because headlines grab the attention and lead the reader into the first paragraph which must sell to the reader the product and service. Then the reader will be interested enough to continue and even if the attention span is limited then they will be interested enough to scroll to the bottom - skipping the middle- and you will refocus using the PS messages at the end.

Here are some examples of which words to use within headlines:

FREE
DISCOVER
POWERFUL
EASY
GUARANTEED
YOU’LL LOVE THIS
MONEY
HOTTEST
NEW
IMPROVED
PROVEN
RESULTS
REVOLUTIONARY
STATE-OF-THE-ART
FANTASTIC
SAVE
BEST
FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY
SECRETS
THE BEST KEPT SECRET
UNBELIEVABLE
MUST SEE TO BELIEVE

The twelve most powerful words in the English language, according to Yale University researchers: DISCOVER, EASY, GUARANTEE, HEALTH, LOVE, MONEY, NEW, PROVEN, RESULTS, SAFETY, SAVE, YOU

Although, your website should not be include content that distracts from the mail message, you can compliment the content with relevant and related features that will keep your visitors interested enough to stay and maybe return later.

Here are a few:

Free Information :
The Internet is the “Information Superhighway.” The best way to introduce yourself to your prospects is through providing Free information on your web site. No matter what you are selling: be it nutrition products, cleaning products, business products, etc., you can find information or create information to provide with it. Do a series of continuing articles, where visitors must return to the site every day or two to read the next part.

You can find an amazing range of articles from the Web-At-Work Online Marketing Center that can be used on your website. This unique site is a members only based knowledge bank and included in the membership fee are 10000+ articles with 2500+ categorised plus 1200 + categorised links on internet marketing, loads of downloads plus much more

The Web Poll:
You can set-up a web poll for visitors relating to the product or service that your website provides. People love web polls, and people like to know what others are thinking. For example an effective poll for website providing a travel service could include questions relating to preferred destinations, modes of travel etc.. Not only is this kind of feedback useful to the owner of the website but also the visitors like to know what’s popular and what is not . You can give a deadline for the poll so that visitors may return to see results. Web polls can be set-up for FREE by visiting www.multicity.com

Newsfeeds :
Offer content that changes daily (or even more frequent). This could be news, sports info, investment info, entertainment, daily recipes, etc. You can add the very latest news to your website and target the information by topics and categories that fit your site. Newsfeeds are free and are provided by www.moreover.com

Free software
Why not provide free software downloads for your visitors. This will keep visitors at your site and if you keep the software updated you may find that you will get return visits. Also the downloads do take time to complete and this extra time at your website may result in a sale or extra lead. Free software is an ideal tool to make your site sticky as the visitor is unlikely to leave until the download is at least complete. Free software can be found at www.upload.com, being the most popular. Choose the relevant software and and make a direct download link from your site.

Provide hundreds of links to needed tools.:
Offer a service which people will need to use periodically. For example a website that compresses GIF images. Or a website with a great collection of financial tools and calculators. How about a website which displays current weather conditions. Try to come up with a service related to your industry, that will keep your prospects coming back.

Give your visitors what they want and they will keep coming back and referring their friends.

Lets give our Traffic Snowball a little push!

So now you have completed the design of your website and you have uploaded the content to your server. The next step is to bring traffic to the website by announcing to the world that your site is live through search engine submission. This should be considered the first little push that we are giving your traffic snowball.

With a rapid increase in the number of web sites competing for exposure, the role of online search engines and directories is becoming critical to any websites success. Eighty seven percent (87%) of web site visitors find their chosen site through search engines.

What’s more, almost all of them use just seven - namely AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, LookSmart, Google, Hotbot and above all, Yahoo

This means that if you don’t have a top listing on these engines, thousands of potential clients will never find you.

There are 3 steps involved in search engine submission
1) Optimization of your web site
2) Submission of your site to the search engines and directories
3) Monitoring of your listings

Lets deal first with Optimization

The website needs to be made “search engine-friendly” before it is submitted to the major search engines This is an art in itself and there are specialist companies, such as Traffic Builder Systems, that deal only in Search engine optimization and rank management.

The first step that is undertaken is to determine the keywords that are relevant to your website.

Some people achieve a top 10 placement in a major search engine and get plenty of traffic. Others do the same but get nothing.

Why?

Simple. The first group selected keywords that many people are searching on, and the second did not!

To find the optimum keywords that are going to bring you the most targeted traffic you could use a tool such as Wordtracker

Wordtracker will compile a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and they tell you how often people search for them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords. Wordtracker helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered. You’ll find out how popular these keywords really are. Then for each major search engine, they will show you the chances of making the top 10.

Once you have got the correct keywords together you will need to format them into META TAGS to place into the HTML of your webpages

If you are going to submit your site to the search engines individually it must be sensitized with META tags.

There are three META tags used by the popular search engines. META tags are added to your website’s HTML coding, and do not appear on your visible webpage. These tags are placed within the head portion of your HTML document, usually directly beneath your tag.

1) The “Keyword” META Tag

The “keyword” META tag helps meta capable search engines in indexing your website. It tells the search engine under which search terms your website should come up under.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”keywords” content=”widgets, cheap widgets, widgets for sale, john store etc..”>

Within this META tag, use your prioritized list of keywords and commanding combinations. Don’t duplicate your keywords too many times. Each keyword should be separated by a comma, and there should be no spaces. Different search engines allow different numbers of keywords. Make sure all keywords listed in your META tag are related to your site.

If you put unrelated keywords in your keyword META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you. Be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags. Some companies have sued because they found their names in the META tags of their competitors.

2) The “Description” META Tag

The “description” META tag helps meta capable search engines to summarize your website.

Here is an example of this tag:
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”John’s widget shop has the largest and cheapest selection of widgets”>

Within this tag, use a description of your website and keep the tag length under 200 characters. Some search engines allow longer or shorter descriptions. Put the most important part of your description first, for cases where search engines do not use all of it.

Some search engines extract your website’s summary from the first 250 characters of your webpage, so be sure you include a good opening paragraph on your webpage. Make sure everything in your description is related to your site. If you put unrelated words or phrases or sentences in your description META tag, some search engines may penalize you or refuse to list you.

As discussed above, be careful not to put competitors’ company names, product names or trademarked names in your META tags.

3) The “Robots” META Tag

The “robots” META tag tells meta capable search engines which pages should get indexed, and which pages should not. You may have certain pages which you may not want to show up in the search engines. You may have test pages, private pages created for a particular customer, and so on.

If you have a frames site, you wouldn’t want to index your HTML documents which display within the various frames which make up your page.

The following options are available for this tag: all, none, index, noindex, follow, nofollow.

If you wanted all of your pages indexed, you would use this tag on your main page:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”all follow”>

It would tell the search engine spider to index your main page, then follow any links it finds on that page, and spider those links.

Use this tag on a page which you don’t want indexed:
<META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex”>

After entering the META tags into the HTML of your website pages and then uploading to the server, you will then need to proceed to the search engines to submit your website.

Doorway pages

Most people optimize each of their webpages for all of their keywords, and to be submitted to all the major search engines. For less popular keywords this strategy will often suffice. However for competitive keywords it won’t get favorable listings, mainly because when you overly fine tune a webpage to score well for one search engine, it will likely score lower for other search engine. For competitive keywords you should consider using a “multiple entry page” strategy.

This involves using multiple entry pages (also called doorway pages, bridge pages, jump pages and gateway pages), each optimized for a particular keyword and/or search engine. Entry pages act as “front doors” to your website. These special pages are designed to score high in keyword density and relevance.

Each entry pages can be fine tuned for one or a few keywords, and can be fine tuned for a particular search engine. It is not advisable to use the above page naming convention with all search engines, as certain search engines may detect that you are using multiple doorways.

To be safe use names which do not resemble one another: The second step is the submission to the search engines

You have the following options:

1) Submit your site manually to the search engines by visiting each one individually. This can be very time consuming and also there is the problem that every search engine is different in the sense that they each use different logarithms for analyze and ranking the website submission.

2) The submission service will submit your website to many hundreds of search engines and directories on a regular basis. This is usually an automated process, with the drawback being you get no advice on optimization. You may or may not receive reports charting your success.

3) The meta-tag optimisers will take your site and optimize it for a one off fee. They may also offer a service to submit the site once it has been optimized. With this service you have little idea of how successful the service has been long after your money has gone.

4) A small number of companies are taking a Search Engine Rank Management approach. This involves the specialist company taking complete, ongoing control of your search engine marketing needs by optimizing, submitting and monitoring your ranking activity on an ongoing basis.

High search engine ranking is the key to unlocking the true potential of your company’s web site.
Based on our industry leading knowledge of search engine technology, Traffic Builder Systems brings you Traffic Builder, an affordable rank management solution for all web site owners.

Finally, the choice is yours but remember that search engine promotion is fundamental to your success and should be the start of the the initial push to get noticed. Investment in good search engine promotion will pay dividends later.

Lets start by giving the Traffic Snowball a name.

The starting point with every website is the domain name and now there is a wider choice than ever with the introduction of NEW domains (.info & .biz)

So what is the difference and which do you choose?

Basically, for the moment .com still rules. If you are not using “.com” address, then you are losing your hard earned visitors. Everyone remembers “.com” before “.net “, it’s that simple. Even most web browsers, if the extension is not entered, will default to “.com”.

A credible and serious business must have its own domain name that is relevant and appropriate to the nature of the business. For example let say the business is “Johns Widget Store” A first and natural choice choice would be johnswidgets.com.

However, you do not need to register ONLY one domain name. You can register as many as you want and point them to the same web content (we’ll come back to this point later)

For example, you can LOAD the domain name with “keywords” which are relevant to the nature of the website.

By registering “KEYWORD RICH” domain names you are going to help skyrocket your search engine rankings! (That’s right just by using keyword saturated domain names you can drastically improve your search engine rankings… really it’s that easy!)

“Keyword Phrases” are now a HOT opportunity… a catch phrase alone can generate a giant source of traffic to your website.

Why? - Because it is catchy!

Not only are these phrases catchy but they can also boost your search engine rankings. Search engines love url’s that are saturated with keywords!

So, think of all the keywords and keyphrases for your product/service/website and put them in your URL.

Load the domain name with your best keywords to get ranked higher in the search engines. Then have it redirect to your main site or use it as a “doorway” page (as we talk about later in the article) to get a much higher ranking in the search engines to forward traffic to you.

Here are example URL’s that will pull great in the search engines ……

www.computer-discount-software-store.com, www.computerdiscountsoftwarestore.com

Notice that I gave the above example with hyphens and without hyphens… it is a little known fact that search engines prefer URL’s with hyphens and visitor prefer them without so make sure you register both!

Also there are the country code domains. For example a url ending in .co.uk would be a first choice for businesses operating in the UK.

As general rule of thumb it would be wise to buy both the .com and the country domain to start. There are only a few companies that are registering the 67 character domain names, and even fewer that are reliable companies. When you come to register your domains (s), you should consider using a domain registration service with at least the following facilities:

- Real-time modification of web forwarding
- Real time modification of url masking

Its important that if you are going to register a few domains for the purpose of creating doorways to your main site that you have the ability to forward the domain using an interface and you are able to modify this at any time in real time.

Some companies provide the forwarding free of charge and may also include a masking service which would be useful for keeping the new domain name visible in the browser whilst serving content from the redirected domain name. URL masking could be used for a variety of purposes but its important that there is a facility to add META tags to the masked domain name.

A domain service that provides URL masking with meta tags would be preferable than using one that provides only standard redirection as the masked domain will be more sensitive to search engines.

Building traffic to your website can be compared to creating a snowball.

Imagine standing at the top of a snow covered hill, picking up a handful of snow and rolling it into a snowball, then putting the snowball on the ground and pushing it down the hill.

The snowball requires a little push at first, maybe a few times to get going but as it moves down the hill it collects snow and begins to grow in size.

The bigger it gets, the faster it moves, picking up speed getting bigger and bigger.

By the time it reaches the bottom of the hill the snowball is so large that it is almost unstoppable.

This snowball effect is a good analogy for Website Traffic Building.

Let me explain.

OK so we’ve slaved over the “hot computer” and created the beautifully crafted, “everyone will love it” website, proudly shown to family and friends and we are now ready to show it to the world and “go live!!”

We upload the website and wait for the people to arrive in droves.

“Build it and they will come” - good title for a film, but when it comes to the Internet

“Build it, do nothing and wait for ever!” is more appropriate.

In other words its as if we have made a snowball and left it at the top of the hill, walked down and waited for the snowball to magically arrive at the bottom as an unstoppable force.

Forget it!

We need to give the little guy a push - a few shoves to get him going. We need roll him along a bit ! Support him and tease down that long journey to the bottom. But when he gets going watch out below!

The same is true with website traffic.

We need to put into place all the different methods and techniques that will start to bring traffic to the website, but most of all create a system so that the traffic will feed of itself until the website becomes an unstoppable traffic guzzling monster!

So lets start at the top……..it begins with a name…….