Web Promotion Basics

by Waylon Prince

Content

The key to driving and maintaining traffic to a site is its content. Sites that have interesting and useful content that is constantly updated, draws more traffic than a site with stale content. Content should be the driving force behind your site, instead of flashy graphics or other bells and whistles.

A related point you must consider when developing your content is to consider what you want to do with your Web site and then develop your content accordingly. When you are thinking about content for your site, develop goals and milestones you hope to accomplish with your site and tailor your content to help you achieve your goals. For example, if you want to sell products through your site, your content should focus on making the sale by including product descriptions, comparison charts, sales contacts, order forms and/or shopping carts, etc. - all designed for the specific purpose of making the sale. As you launch new products and/or features, you would then constantly update your site to reflect these changes.

Link Exchanges

As a user of Web Site Traffic Builder, you've already taken the first steps in promoting your site. You've used our program to register your site and used the other Traffic Builder tools to position your site and check your placement results. Now what? It's simple; you can participate in a number of online programs to increase your site's visibility and traffic. One of the techniques used by search engines to determine site placement is the number of outside links that refer to a specific site. The more outside links contained in a site, the more popular search engines believe the site to be and will rank it accordingly. To increase the number of outside links to your site, you can take advantage of a number of affiliate programs or banner/link exchanges with little or no cost.

An affiliate program works as follows: you post a link on your site from another company that offers products and services related to your company's business. Visitors to your site will then click-through to the affiliate's site and purchase these products and you earn a commission on each sale. You can also develop an affiliate program of your own, where your company offers commissions to outside sites that sell your products and services to their customers.

A banner/link exchange program is similar to an affiliate program, but it is geared more toward advertising your site, rather than selling your products and services. A banner/link exchange program works like this: you circulate your banner or link among sites with similar content, e.g., a car-enthusiast site may swap links and banners with an automotive supply site, generating more traffic to both sites. You can learn more about affiliate and banner/link exchange programs at the following Web sites: www.associateprograms.com, www.linkexchange.com, and www.smartage.com.

Traffic Monitoring

On the surface, monitoring your Web traffic may not seem like an important function in promoting the site, but it is a critical element that helps you determine the success of your online promotion efforts.

When looking for a Web-site statistics program, you want something that will go beyond measuring the number of hits your site receives; you want to measure trend and demographic information as well. Some of the things that are important to track are your file and image accesses, which give you an idea of what content is of interest to your visitors. You also want to have the means to track how visitors enter your site, and the path they take through your site and ultimately the pages where they exit from your site. Measuring this information gives you an overall picture of how traffic flows through your site and the locations of the dead pages and areas of your site.

Another important element in monitoring your site's traffic is measuring search-engine performance and keywords used to find your site. This statistic shows you each search engine that refers your site and how many times your site is referred by each engine. Measuring this statistic shows you the success or failure of your Web-promotion efforts in regards to individual engines. By identifying search engines with low referral scores, you can increase your promotion efforts to increase your referrals. Keyword referrals follow the same concept; you measure each keyword used to find your site and the number of times each particular keyword is used. Here, you can track the success of your Web-promotion efforts by monitoring your keywords. You can see the most-popular words used to find your site and incorporate them into your submission efforts to boost your search-engine placement.

There are a number of online and stand-alone products available on the market that monitor and gather statistical information about your Web site, many of them can be found by doing a search under the topic of traffic analysis. Intelliquis also offers a complete statistical software program called Web Site Traffic Analyzer, which will track many of the categories mentioned in this article. You can learn more about Traffic Analyzer at: www.trafficanalyzer.net.

Resources: Home | Archive | Contact | Free Consultation
Info: Software | Download | Company Store

Copyright © 2001 Intelliquis Interantional, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Terms and Conditions of Use - Privacy Policy

Read More
@

Do you have questions about promoting your Web Site? More Info

Call Jim Wiggins at
1.801.9902600 x2013
@

Having trouble determining what keywords to use for your site's description?

Try your competitors' keywords!

Read More
@