Promoting your website used to be a rather easy thing to do in the late 90s. All you had to do was type in three lines of code known as meta tags on the top of the home page of your website. Then you would take your site and submit it to search engines and directories and presto it’s done. Now let us fast-forward to present day.
Driving traffic to your website is now a time consuming, daunting and overwhelming task. It has become so complex that there are now specialists you can hire to help you effectively promote your website. The experts are excellent in most cases, however they are not cheap. What is the small business owner supposed to do to effectively drive traffic to your website?
First, you will want to build a strong business foundation. If you don’t take your business seriously your customers aren’t going to take you seriously. Create a business plan, create a marketing plan and figure out who your client/customer is. These may not seem like relevant tasks when it comes to get traffic to your website, however if you don’t know who you are supposed to cater to how are you going to be market your website.
Create your brand and be consistent. Make sure that you are using the same colors, logo and motto everywhere on your website. This helps present a professional and respectable image to your potential customers. Remember, your internet clients are not going to meet you, the first impression they are going to get of you and your company is your website. Make sure you are putting your best foot forward.
Add the “Recommend This Site” button to your site. This is a nifty little widget that will allow a person that has visited your site and thinks it great to recommend your site to a friend. They click this button on your page and a form will come up where they will input their email and their friend’s email and a nice little note will be sent out with a link to your website.
Subscription boxes are also great ways to generate more traffic to your site. They also help you build your list. If someone opts in, meaning they sign up for whatever you have to offer you have access and permission to email them periodically with new offers, deals and newsletters. This will allow you build your targeted traffic up and build your list.
When it comes to making your site search engine friendly to improve your ranking, which will help you drive traffic to your website you want to make sure your site has title tags. You title tags should be 60 or so characters long and include some of your keywords.
Header tags are also important. These are numbered from one to seven and should be used for each title you have on your page.
Keyword meta tags are also important, and it is important that you use these correctly. Your keyword meta tags should not be more than 20 keywords. The ideal number is between 15 and 20, more than 20 and the search engine will mark your site as a spam site which will actually hurt your ranking. Prioritize your keywords and then submit your site to each search engine manually.