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Building a website and
getting it online is easy. Driving visitors to it is the more difficult
part. Most people are not patient enough when it comes to build up
traffic. They expect thousands of visitors a week after they go live with
their website. But that is not how it works. We share some secrets of how
to make your website more successful.
A) Provide content:
Search engines love content. As more content you can provide as better off
you are. Don't put all the content on one page. Build many pages with
content. The reason for this is that every page gets spidered separately
by Google and other search engines. Each page of yours in their index is
an additional chance that your link gets mentioned in somebody else search
results. Quality content is more valuable to search engines as they want
to provide real information to visitors. Search engines do not want to
refer to link farms or redirects. If they can refer a customer directly to
the most valuable content the better for the search engine. Search engines
live of providing good results.
B) Domain Name: Do
not use a domain name like www.freewebpages.com/~yourname - search engines
don't like those. It also prevents you from building a brand name (your
ultimate goal should be building a brand). Spend the $9.00 per year for
your own domain name. It's money spend well worth.
C) Your website
design: The simpler the better. Here is a rule of thumb: text content
should outweigh the html content. The pages should be W3 validated and
work in Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla's Firefox. If you go too
fancy with stuff some search engine spiders might not be able to read your
pages. Look at Google, eBay or Yahoo themselves - simple design, easy to
navigate and people are flocking to it. If you use sub-directories the
directory names should be descriptive (i.e. "steel-products" or
"paper-clips"). The same is true for you pages. If you are able to give
pages a descriptive name as better you are off in the long run.
Website performance is
critical. If your pages load too slow you will punished. Make sure the
website sits on a fast web server and that the page sizes are 20K or less.
If you can keep page sizes to 15K or less you are ahead of the curve.
D) Build one content
page per day or at least 3-4 per week. You may think you do not have
that many products. But establish yourself as a source of product or
industry related information. If customers can learn from the content you
provide they respect you and your business and this will lead them to use
your services and products, too. Pages with 300-600 words should be more
than sufficient.
E) Keywords: Make
sure you use important keywords in the title of each topic and through-out
the text without looking like a SPAMMER (meaning: do not go overboard
using the keywords). Find out what important keywords for your business
are.
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