4 Simple Ways to Increase Traffic and Sales

If you are a growing website, then you need all of the help you can get.  Once you are growing at a steady pace, you can only go two directions: way up or way back down.  Do not be afraid to try new things, listen to unsolicited advice, and most importantly, communicate with your audience.  Here are four avenues of web marketing that will increase your traffic and sales.

1. Add more video content

You do not have to stray too far from your successful formula when entering the video podcast market.  However, treat your audience with respect.  Play up to your audience so that they always look forward to something new, educational and interesting from your website.  Naturally, any video presentation must mirror the same themes of your successful text content.

2. Add more viral content to the site

Viral content includes shared videos, product reviews, sharing features (as in Tweet this or Digg this), ratings and publishing comments.  In general, the more you involve the community, the more popular your website becomes.  The more popular your website becomes, the more obligation you give yourself to provide new features and new content.  Include podcasts, news boards, and anything outside the box that comes to mind.  Think of your website as a newspaper.  Have you ever read a repeat newspaper?

3. Get involved with social media marketing

Sure, sure—social media websites are the latest trend, fad and waste of time out there.  Be that as it may, you are crazy if you are going to ignore all of this good publicity.  Every company that matters has their own Facebook, MySpace and Twitter page right now.  Why, even CEOs of major companies are now blogging or tweeting, so they can present a much-needed human factor to their company names.  (Yes, believe it or not CEOs are human, contrary to what you have heard.)  At the very least, you will be interacting with a handful of new prospective clients.  What is the harm in that?

4. Invest in SEO marketing

SEO marketing in this context involves both search engine optimization and article marketing.  SEO for your website will build a foundation for a successful marketing campaign.  Article marketing will help you increase in popularity thanks to back linking.  Both ventures involve the same thing: writing high quality keyword articles.

The most effective way to advertise is web marketing.  Use these four tips to boost traffic and sell your services!

Online Marketing

June 22, 2010

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4 SEO Tips for the Beginner

Have you just completed a website project?  Are you now looking for help with search engine optimization?  SEO is indeed an avenue worth pursuing, as it can bring high traffic and high sales when done effectively.  How are you to understand SEO?  You may already know the basics of the concept: inserting targeted keywords into your web content with hopes of drawing new viewers.  What else must a beginner know?

1. You must regularly upload SEO-rich writing

In understanding popular search engines, it is important to remember consistency.  You must regularly feed the search engines with SEO-rich content, on a monthly, weekly or perhaps even a daily basis (depending on your industry).  Many webmasters make the mistake of writing two or three articles with keywords scattered throughout.  Such a minimal investment will not make much of a dent in the system.

2. You must be proactive in submitting your site and your articles around the net

Some webmasters make the mistake of writing a series of articles but not really marketing them elsewhere.  While inserting targeted keywords throughout various pages is good practice, this alone may not elevate your company to the top 10.  While focusing on SEO for your website, you must also pay attention to article marketing.  Be sure to submit your site to as many search engines as possible.  Be proactive in marketing your SEO-rich website.

3. Insert meta tags for effective optimization

Writing interesting, SEO-rich content may be a waste of time if you do not format the meta tags correctly.  You must optimize meta tags in each individual webpage for the best results.  You should also verify that any CMS software you are working with also has optimized pages that will be noticed in keyword searches.

4. Focus on quality writing and keyword use

Content may be “king”, but without an audience, your content will be worthless.  Be sure that you are writing quality content (enthusiastic, informative, and specific) and that it relates to the keyword search.  The content should be unique and written by a professional-quality writer.  Remember that some search engines do have human editors and they will discriminate against articles that were written solely for search engines and not for human eyes.  It’s not just keywords that sell products—it’s quality writing.

These are the basics of search engine optimization.  While there are many other technical issues to consider, these four rules must be followed if you are ever to make a successful online campaign.

seo, website design

June 22, 2010

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3 Web Design Mistakes You Might Be Making

Are you trying to figure out why web traffic is coming in but not sticking around to look through your website?  A website is your company’s greeting to web surfers.  You want your greeting to be a high five or a warm handshake, not a slap in the face.  Your website design may be rubbing people the wrong way, which may have them quickly hitting that “back” button!

1. Burying users in new windows and pop ups

Nothing annoys web surfers more than a website that bombards them with a barrage of new windows opening up.  The basic theory behind this practice is this: when a user clicks a link on your site it will open in a new window so that if they decide to close that window, they will still be on your original site.  One of the problematic issues here is that some computers are slow and have problems with slowing and stalling when multiple windows are open.  Most users will quickly close a pop up assuming it is spam and not even see the information you provided.  Many may feel pop ups are a downright hostile move (aka that slap in the face we were talking about).  All of your hard work on your website will be wasted when they click the back button before giving your precious content a chance.

2. Making information available only in PDF format

When users are zipping along the information super highway, a PDF file can be likened to a red light.  No one is a fan of long load times or awkward scrolling and microscopic fonts.  While a PDF file is great if you are printing the file out to paper, it is usually not the right size for a computer screen.  A large mass of data is hard to navigate, especially when a surfer’s normal browser buttons are disabled.  A PDF is sometimes enough for a person to put on their brakes and put their search in reverse.

3. Installing a useless search box

You may have a great website with all the information a person could want on a certain topic, but if it is hard to navigate, then a good website search box is important.  If your search box is so strict that it does not allow for typos or variants of a word, then users will probably become quickly frustrated and may seek the information on a more user-friendly website.  A very good search box, hidden from a user’s plain sight will do no good either.  A simple box at the top or bottom of a page is what most users will be looking for.

website design

June 22, 2010

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Thoughts For Website Navigation

Whilst considering the navigation for a particular website I was working on, it became clear to me how important it is to plan the structure of your website before the design work begins. The site needed a simple navigation bar with only a few areas to keep the navigation as simple as possible for visitors. Whilst this is a nice idea it can also be quite limiting in ways especially if you want to add lots of content but here are a few ideas to help structure your site and to provide a clear navigation structure for visitors so that they are not lost and overwhelmed by a mass of navigational links.

Drop Down Navigation

An excellent way to keep things nice and tidy with your websites navigation is to use drop down menus. You can list your main important pages and have sub pages related to the main page listed beneath in a drop down menu so that when a visitor hovers the mouse pointer over the main area page link a list of the sub pages will then display / drop down. This works really well for keeping the initial visual of the navigation bar nice and simple helping to not overwhelm your visitors with a mass of navigational links.

Separate Areas

If you have a lot of pages to include within an area, for example, if you want to add lots of articles to your website using a drop down menu to list the individual articles, this may not be the best option as after a number of years there may well be many which will cause the menu to become too large. One solution to this is to have separate areas, for example, you could have a single navigation link to an articles page and on this page the articles could then be listed.

Content Management Systems

Many different platforms can be used as a content management system including WordPress which offers a simplistic and fantastic solution for managing lots of content. The use of pages, categories and blog posts can be a great way to separate content into different areas. There are many different content management system platforms but WordPress would have to be one of the most user friendly for people who are less familiar with such platforms. WordPress used to be just considered as a blogging platform but with so many creative developments the WordPress platform has become a popular choice for managing lots of content. The use of sidebars and widgets also allows for listing additional areas of the site helping to separate the navigation links in to logical areas without trying to cram all of the navigational links within the main navigation bar within the header section of the website.

website design

June 8, 2010

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Welcome…

Welcome to websitearticles.wordpress.com!

At the time of writing this post this website will be looking rather sparse with website articles but over the next few weeks plenty of online articles will be added. From articles about website design to articles about search engine optimisation (seo) and online marketing.

If you are one of the very few that has found this website at such an early stage please check back soon for the latest developments to the site.

Thanks for reading and hope to see you again soon.

websitearticles.wordpress.com

June 8, 2010

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