Do you have a plan for building traffic to your site?  Do you know where to start?  The answers to these questions can often seem daunting but developing a brief action plan against all of the key traffic building areas I list in this post can help and yield results quickly.  This output will help you build the framework of a long-term digital marketing plan that will ultimately start to build traffic to your website

So this post is more of a list but a valuable one.  Think about what you can do now against each of these points and implement them as soon as possible.  Make sure you can track the new visitors you develop from each source in your analytics account so you can quickly measure the results to see what is working then do more of the same.

If you would like me to cover any of the points below in more detail just post the name of the topic you would like me to write about in the comments box below.

Search Marketing

• Search engine optimization – See my blog post How to optimize the design of your website which contains some useful tips.
• Paid search such as pay per click (PPC)

Online Partnerships

Who can you build an online partnership within your market?  Who operates in a similar space but is not competing?  Who is writing blogs on your market?  Who has a similar profile of customers or visitors that could be selling or promoting your product?  Types of online partnership:

• Affiliate Marketing – think about what deal would entice an affiliate to sign-up and make some approaches.  Are there any affiliate networks with a track record in your sector?
• Sponsorship
• White-labelling
• Co-branding
• Link building – this can help but make sure the links are natural and would resonate with your own audience,  make sure the traffic they are likely to generate is quality traffic, and not just there to boost visitors.

Online advertising

• Purchasing advertising space on specific websites – specifically those who attract your target market in large volumes
• Ad networks such as Google Ad Exchange or Google Adsense
• Sponsorship
• Audience targeting
• Re-marketing shows advertisements to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the web.

Email (Opt-in)

Make sure you always provide the recipient with a method of opting out of your email to make sure you stay within the law.  When you write your email content think of a title that will encourage the recipient to open the email and write the content to grab their attention in the first few seconds otherwise they are unlikely to read on. Types of email lists:

• In house lists, you’ve already developed
• Rented lists
• Lists your partners have developed
• Advertising in third party e-newsletters

Viral Marketing

• Buzz marketing – what shareable content can you create for the distribution of social media channels?  What works for your competitors? Video content is particularly shareable.
• Generating social media mentions – Buzz marketing will clearly help but so will engage with your followers.
• Sharable emails

And lastly don’t forget…

Offline Marketing

Make sure you mention prominently in all of your offline advertising efforts your website and if there is space in your social media channels.

• Traditional advertising – paper, magazine, flyers, radio, TV
• Sales promotions
• Personal selling
• PR
• Sponsorship
• Direct mail
• Product packaging

I hope this post gives provides you some inspiration for ideas on how to build traffic to your website.

In today’s post I am going to tell you how the design of your website can affect your site’s search engine optimization.  It is important that you understand that you can make your website invisible to search engines or drop your search engine rankings if you get the design process wrong.

Here is how to optimize the design of your website:

• Plan to have plenty of text – I know I have mentioned this in a number of previous posts but it is crucial to the success of your website.  If you don’t have enough text you won’t be able to include enough keywords or worse appear to the search engines that you are ‘keyword stuffing’ and seriously damage your ranking.  There is also the danger that you don’t include certain keywords that prospects use to find the type of product or service you are offering – which means you won’t rank at all for that search.

• Always put your most important content at the top of the page – When you are surfing the net, choosing a book or magazine I bet you can read the content quickly to see if what you are looking at is of interest.  Most people adopt the same tactic and will quickly scan a page from top to bottom to check relevance therefore make sure you put your most important content in the initial few paragraphs and use a quality “punchy” heading.  Break up your text using subheadings and bullet points too where relevant.  The search engines will also scan the content at the top of the page first and will use this to assess what your page is about.  Content lower down the page may not even get noted.

• Don’t overuse images, flash and video’s – I’m not saying don’t use them; just limit their use to complement quality content.  The search bots can’t read this type of media and will ignore it.  However you can use a descriptive ALT tag to help a search bot understand the relevance of the image or video.  Don’t stuff your Alt Tag description with keywords; simply describe the image as you see it.  An ALT tag is also useful to those who can’t see images and the blind will often have software that reads a page out loud so keeping the description natural will make sense to them.  Whilst images and videos don’t help with SEO if you make them shareable you could strike “viral gold” and drive significant traffic to your site from social media shares.

• Maximize your SEO efforts on every page – not every visitor to your website is going to land on your home page nor would you want them to, it is far better for them to land on a page that addresses their search query quickly without the need for them to search within your site.  So with this in mind have a plan for what you want to achieve on each page, what type of visitor you want to attract, envisage their information needs and decide what action you want to encourage them to take when they land on it.  If you do this well you should significantly increase the variety of keywords and phrases that your site ranks for, improve the probability of matching the search requirements of your visitors and therefore convert more visits into sales.

    Also check out how:  How to build traffic to your website

• Organize your site effectively – include your keywords in your file and folder names.  Name your site pages with your keywords too.  Make sure the structure of your website is not complex and avoid having a deep hierarchy of folders and directory levels.  Keep your hierarchy as flat as can be as it makes your site much easier to navigate.

• Avoid having duplicate content in your site as it can be seen as spamming by the search engines.  If you are selling multiple product variations introduce a dynamic drill-down navigation tool like what you would have on Amazon for customers to filter the product options to match their requirements.  An example can be seen in the left-hand content sidebar in the screenshot below.

• Test – before you go live and during the lifetime of your website continually test it.  There are various tools that you can use to do this.  I often use Google and Bing’s Webmaster tools to make sure my site is being crawled and that there are no crawl errors.  Familiarise yourself with both of these tools, they aren’t difficult to use and can be useful to highlight areas for improvement.