The Marketing Farm’s online marketer, Xenia Slosarcikova, provides an insight into increasing your website traffic

Have you ever been to Las Vegas? Taking an elevator all the way up to the top of the Eiffel Tower offers great views of the Sin city. But it also makes you realise that before Rafael Rivera set his foot in Las Vegas Valley, there was nothing but plain abandoned dessert. Only the discovery of water rich springs started bringing all this traffic to Nevada dessert to become a prime location for a shop facility and town. Now imagine that your website, without much traffic, is just like that dry piece of land 200 years ago.

The days of putting an advert in the Yellow Pages and waiting for the phone call are over. Simply registering your website to various search engines is just the beginning of the long journey. That’s when Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes and the sooner you get started, the faster your business will grow.

Did you know that about 36% of internet users consider a company listed among the top results on search engines to be a top one within its field and about 60% of users click on a website link within the first page of results? Being listed in the Top 10 of natural search results should be a key priority for every online business. About 85% of searchers click on natural results comparing to paid results that appear on the top or side of the search engine results pages and are only half are as visible to searchers and mostly less effective.

There are numerous SEO techniques you can use to improve your natural traffic. The best start is to optimise the website itself. However, the first and most important issue to start with is to know your competition, analyse it and learn from its strengths and weaknesses. Then put yourself in the skin of searcher who is looking for product or services related to your business. What keywords would he put in the search query box? What results would he be interested in seeing? Don’t forget about optimising images on your website to make them visible to search engine spiders who crawl your website to find information related to your search query. Pay attention to writing quality articles and avoid sloppy texts that are hard to read. Focus on link building with subscribing your site to related directories and communities.

And update, update, update…

Understanding how people use search and what they search for is crucial for website publishers and SEO practitioners. Retail is among the first most searched categories followed by entertainment. It is based on one simple assumption – people love shopping, they always have and they always will. The amount of money spent on online shopping has grown despite recession and that’s what your business should benefit from. Placing your advert on relevant websites or exchange links is the best way to do it. Just be careful because unlike Las Vegas you don’t want your website to be related to any gambling or sex links!

Since El Rancho Vegas became the first hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip in 1941, 35 million people visit Vegas year round thanks to its entertaining facilities built in the middle of the dessert.

With sophisticated SEO you can bring as much traffic to your website as you want, so it becomes The Las Vegas of the Web!

Author
Xenia Slosarcikova constructs and implements SEO campaigns for a wide variety of businesses. Please call her on +44(0)1242 222878 or email xenia@themarketingfarm.co.uk.

Tags: cheltenham, gloucestershire, how to increase website traffic, marketing agencies cheltenham, online business, online marketing, organic search, search engines, seo, SEO services, top 10, top results

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 7:20 am and is filed under The Website Farm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.