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Design
your site for traffic in 2007
What better way to start the new year than with more
traffic to your web site. Web traffic is a critical part of your internet
business and it is imperative that you design it to bring you the
most amount of traffic possible.
Designing your site for traffic includes offering
good content, easy navigation and a logical flow. Additionally you
must also build your site to draw traffic from the search engines
because if you can obtain high search engine ranking, you can enjoy
free traffic.
It's important to note, however that good ranking won't do you much
good without a well designed site and a well designed site can't bring
you visitors if no one knows it's there. Both high ranking and good
design need to work together.
How do we pull all this together? Let's take a look.
A word about Design
A huge mistake I see many website owners make is
that they get caught up in making their site cute. They love the little
animations, buttons and dramatic backgrounds. What they fail to consider
is that these things are worthless if you don't offer good content,
easy navigation and a logical flow.
First of all don't try to be everything to everyone.
Design your site around a theme, preferably a niche theme. Don't confuse
your readers with links all over the page. Design a logical flow.
Lead your viewers to where you would like them to go. Leave plenty
of white space and keep your pages organized. Clearly state at the
top of your pages what you are about and what you would like your
viewers to do.
Secondly, I don't recommend pop-ups. I find that
the majority of internet users find them annoying. The demand for
pop-up blockers is a good indication that viewers don't want to see
them.
Thirdly, offer good content. Provide information
on your site that will help viewers solve a problem. Offer information
that they might not get elsewhere. Write reviews regarding your products.
Write newsletters and articles and most importantly offer something
of value for free. Give your viewers a reason to come back. It will
also build trust in you.
Traffic builders
Good search engine ranking can bring lots of visitors
to your site. It often takes a few months to rank well but the payoff
is lots of qualified traffic. While it's not practical to depend solely
on search engines for traffic it can complement your other advertising
campaigns nicely. Aiming for high search engine placement is always
a plus.
Keep these in mind when developing your site for the search
engines:
Domain names
Choose a domain name that has your site keywords in it. For example,
if you're a site about pet care, try to include the words "pet
care" or words related to pet care in your domain name if you
can.
Keywords
Keywords require research and there are several tools to help you
out in this area. Here is my favorite:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
I suggest focusing on only one keyword or keyword
phrase per page of your website. This may not seem like a lot but
if your site has 20 pages you can focus on 20 keywords. Each page
should be considered a landing page for your site. If you have proper
navigation on your pages it will easily allow viewers to see everything
you have to offer.
Include your keyword or keyword phrase at the top of your page as
well as in at least one header phrase. Also work the keywords into
the body of your text as often as you can without sounding redundant.
Your keywords should be in the Title tag as well as in your page description
tag. Many search engines no longer look at the keyword tags but I
recommend using them and including the plural forms as well.
Alt Tags
Search engines don't index images, therefore any text on your site
that is presented in image format won't get indexed. To solve this
problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be
sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site,
fill in your ALT tags with your keywords. This will boost your keyword
frequency and help your site achieve better ranking
Linking
Search engines will rate your site by who is linking to your site,
so it's important to establish quality, related links. This can be
accomplished in a few ways. One way is to establish reciprocal links
with other like sites. When exchanging links be sure to include your
keywords in your site title.
Review the page you are exchanging links with. Be
sure it is a site that you find easy to navigate and informative.
I also recommend that the site's index page have a Google PR rating
of at least one. This ensures that the site is not being penalized
by Google. If it is a penalized site then you could be penalized as
well for linking to it.
Include a 'tell a friend' and 'bookmark' script on your site. This gives viewers an easy way to bookmark you and most of
all return to your site.
Include a Site Map
Site Maps let visitors know what information you have, how it's organized,
where it is located with respect to other information, and how to
get to that information with the least amount of clicks possible.
Site maps also provide spider food for search engine robots. This
can increase your chances of becoming indexed because a site map allows
the search engines to easily visit every page of your site.
A site map works best if you include a link to your site map in the
navigation of every page on your site.
Finally, don't let your site become stale. I have
found that my search engine rankings improve when I periodically add
new pages to my site and keep the content new and fresh. Follow these
tips and 2007 may be your year for traffic. 
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