- Learn to Submit Your Pages to the Search Engines Properly:
It’s said that 80% of Web surfers find the sites they go to through the search engines and directories.
It stands to reason then, that being listed in the search engines and directories is very important.
However, if your site is listed in the engines but you come up 58,499 when people search for information your site offers, your listing isn’t going to bring you much traffic.
The average person won’t go beyond the first two pages of search engine results. That means that if your Web site doesn’t show up within the top 10-20 results, you’ll never get the thousands of visitors you could have gotten.
As of the writing of this article, if someone searches for Offline Marketing Tips in the AltaVista Search Engine, you will find over 929,296 web pages.
Lucky for us that we come up in the first position and not at the 457,123 position. Or was it luck?
There is quite a bit to know about properly submitting to the search engines and directories to ensure that you get listed.
There is even more to know about how to design your Web pages to help give you the best chance of showing up near the top of the results.
There is not enough space in this tips article to get into these details.
Just understand, that it is rarely enough to just submit your page to 700 search engines and then think you will get thousands of visitors. Chances are… you won’t.
- Know the difference between Hits, Pages Views and Unique Visitors:
HITS: Each of the files that comprise your Web page must be loaded from your Web host’s computer server each time someone comes to your Web page.
Each graphic on your page is a separate file that must be loaded. The HTML code file that is used to create your Web page on your visitors’ computers must also be loaded from your host’s server.
Each file load is called a Hit. So if you have 20 graphics on your Web page that would represent 21 Hits. 20 for the graphic files and 1 for the HTML code file.
Each additional visitor to visit your Web page would also represent 21 Hits. The same would be true for every page on your Web site. Depending on how may graphics you have on each of your pages, you could accumulate thousands of HITS from very few visitors.
You can never use Hits as a measure of how popular your Web site is. Hits have no relationship to visitors. If your Webmaster keeps telling you that you are getting thousands of Hits to your site, you may consider getting yourself a new Webmaster.
PAGE VIEWS: Each time a visitor goes to one of your pages it is counted as a Page View. If the same person leaves that page and comes back a few minutes later, he would be counted as another page view.
It doesn’t matter if the same person comes back to your page 50 times, it would be counted as 50 Page Views.
Because of this, you can’t use Page Views as a gauge for how many visitors are coming to your Web site.
UNIQUE VISITORS: This is the only true representation as to how many visitors you are getting to your Web site and the individual pages on your site.
When a visitor come to your home page, they are considered a Unique Visitor to that page. If they leave your home page and then return to your home page a few minutes later, they are not considered a new visitor, they are not counted again.
However, if they leave for 2-3 hours, and come back again, they will be counted as another Unique Visitor.
This is the most accurate count of how many people are actually visiting your Web site pages. Make sure you are being provided with Unique Visitor numbers by your Web Host server stats, or by your Webmaster.
- Give Your Visitors an Easy Way to Contact You:
As your visitors get to know, like and trust you by visiting your Web site and receiving your newsletters and promotions, they may have questions or suggestions. Give them an easy way to contact you.
One of the best ways to do this is to provide a contact page. You can list different contact categories, such as Questions about Your Order, or Suggestions for Your Site, Question about Your Product, etc.
You can then create an e-mail link for them to click on that would put the specific category question in the e-mail Subject Line.
This way, you would know exactly what type of question or comment is being received. Plus, you can answer many of the common questions that come up repeatedly right on this contact page.
- Market, Market, Market Your Web Site:
Once you have a solid Web site strategy and you have designed your site to carry out that strategy, then you have to go out into the world and promote your Web site to the masses.
With an effective strategy and a well-designed Web site, you should be able to sell around 1% of the visitors to your home page.
If your system is working well and you are selling 1% of the visitors to your home page, then the name of the game becomes attracting as many people to your home page as possible.
Drive thousands of people to your home page each week and you can begin to enjoy a nice steady income. Double the number of visitors to your home page and you will double your sales.
Learn everything you can about marketing to grow the number of visitors to your site and your number of subscribers to your newsletter, and you will do well.
