Is Your Site Working For You?

Creating a website is easy. Anyone will tell you that. But running a successful site? Making money? That's another story altogether.

The two big challenges when running a website are:

• Attract visitors to your site
• Convince them to stay / don't scare them off

If you can do those two things, then you've got yourself a customer! Let's go into more detail on these two oh-so-important steps.

Attract Visitors to Your Site

To give your site a fighting chance you have to send lots of eyeballs in it's direction. Your visitors will come from three main sources: search sites, referrals, and directly.

Direct Connection

First, many will arrive directly, by typing your web address (ex: www.bitwavedesign.com) directly into their web browser. This means that they obtained your web address directly from you, or from your business card, print advertisement or maybe it was passed on by word of mouth.

So depending on the type of site and your target audience, you may want to invest in some local advertising, by means of newpaper ads, flyers, business cards, signs and so forth. If you're targeting customers nationwide or worldwide, you'll likely want to spend your advertising budget elsewhere.

Link Power!

Second, some of your visitors will arrive from links on other websites. Establish relationships with other websites right away, and trade links. Search out compatible businesses. The extra visits are nice, but one of the main benefits is that search engines grade, or rank, pages largely based on 'link power'.

The reasoning is that a site with more inbound links is more likely to have relevant information to a search. So a website with more links to it would appear above an identical site in a list of search results. That translates to more visitors.

The Importance of Search

Finally, many visitors will find you via search sites like Google and Yahoo. Getting a good listing in major search engines is an involved topic, but the basic formula involves having lots of helpful paragraphs of helpful content (text and photos) on your site, with popular keywords sprinkled around, and then getting other sites to link to yours.

Can't think of any content to put on your site? Think of all the questions you answer in the day to day operations of your business. Why not answer them on your site? You can also write a how-to article, a review of a product, an explanation of a complicated topic, or a list of tips. Just think of ways to be helpful to your customers.

Don't forget to track your site statistics. Most web servers include a service that let's you analyze your website activity logs. A good package will include not just the number of pages and visits, but also a list of referring sites, search engine keywords used, most popular pages, and other helpful info. Also, ask your web site designer about Google Analytics, which we use and love.

Convince them to Stay

Part 2 is coming soon!

Don't Scare Them Away!

Well, for now get busy with attracting visitors.