Driving Traffic to Your Web Site

Driving Traffic to Your Web Site
Just having a Web site will not generate traffic. You will have to develop strategies to drive
visitors to your Web site. Be aware that you will be inundated with solicitations from companies
claiming that they can get you millions of customers. Most of them do not produce results.
There are several valid ways to drive traffic to your Web site.
• Search engine registration – This accounts for a large volume of traffic
driven on the Internet. Your site should be submitted periodically with all of the
major search engines. In addition, you can pay for positioning of your Web site
information on some search engines (e.g., Yahoo and Google), on a pay-per-click
basis. Under this setup, you pay the search engine every time a customer clicks
through to your Web site. Typically, your credit card is charged at the end of the
month for the number of “click throughs.”
To generate substantial traffic to your site through search engines, make sure that
it has a high ranking. We recommend that you work with an Internet consultant
who will submit your Web site to search engines and use various techniques to
improve your ranking. The consultant will work with you to place meta tags on
the Web pages of your site. Meta tags are codes that provide a summary of the
content on a Web page as well as keywords related to the page.
• Link exchanges – You can drive traffic to your site through links. This means
you can establish an alliance with other Web sites that will place a link to your
site on their own site. You may also carry a link to their Web site on your site.
This is called a link exchange. In exchanging links with other Web sites, look for
companies with whom you share something in common.
• Affiliate programs – You can also drive traffic by developing an affiliate
program. Affiliate programs will also serve to increase sales. Affiliates promote
your products and services on their Web site. From any sales that are generated
from the affiliate’s site, you pay a commission agreed to with the affiliate.
Having an affiliate program creates an additional sales force, one that you do not
have to account for on your payroll.
• Banner ads – Online, you can place banner ads on other Web sites. You can
measure the effectiveness of your banner ad by the number of clicks you get on
your Web site from that ad. This is referred to as click-through ratio.
• Marketing materials – Listing your Web sites on all your marketing materials,
such as brochures and business cards, is another way to drive traffic to your web
site.