How to Get Customers for Free |
There's no shortage of ways to spend money promoting your online shop - and certainly no shortage of people willing to take your money! However, search engines can be sending you qualified customers all day every day. How do you get a piece of this traffic? It's estimated that 70% of people stop at the first 10 results in most search engines and over 90% don't go beyond the first 30. If your shop isn't in the top of the search results, you're missing out. We'll go through the five steps to getting you higher in the search engine rankings. Choose the right keywords
You need to decide which search term(s) you want to be top for. This might not be as obvious as you think. Firstly, you need to know what people are (and aren't) searching for. Being the number 1 result for a search term no one uses is no
good. The Overture keyword selector tool can show you what people are searching for. Take some guesses as to what people are
looking for, try them out and see what the tool says - you might be surprised! Do a
Google search for a possible keyword. If, for example, you see 5,000,000 results returned you have to consider: can you beat 4,999,990 of them? You might be better off getting a number 1 position for a lesser keyword than a number 200 for a big one.
Be careful not to be too ambitious - that keyword with the most traffic might be
highly competitive in the search engines. If you are competing against a
multi-million dollar online shop you're unlikely to win. Make sure your site is search engine friendly
The goal here is to make sure the search engines like your shopping cart site. You might need some help from your techies with this.
- Create a sitemap pointing to all your pages, or all your key pages. This helps the search engines find all your pages.
- Include your keywords in your HTML title tags in all your key shopping cart pages.
- Include your keywords in a h1 tag.
- If your shopping cart or CMS uses session IDs in the URL, turn this off, or change to a different tool. You can usually tell if you have this turned on if you URL looks like http://www.widgets.com/products/page.php?product=2329&session=29dha9198yfka8129fnv0. The big long session number is the dangerous part.
- Make your HTML code clean & validated - most search engines prefer this.
- Make sure your keywords are included in the copy on your site.
Some shopping carts such as Erol or osCommerce (with an add on module) provide excellent search engine optimization tools. Get links
It's no secret - most search engines love sites that have lots of links pointing at them. Get your customers & suppliers to link to you. This is the single most important thing you can do. There are companies that specialize in
helping you get links - look them up if it's important to you. Watch your traffic
If your web host provides you with web statistics, then check them closely. Probably the most popular web statistics software is AWStats. This provides information on what people are searching for when they arrive at your site. This data is gold. Find out what people are looking for, and make sure that they can get it - easily! Content, content and more content
Search engines love content - the more content the better. Detailed product descriptions, articles relevant to your product line, whatever, the search engines love it. So start writing, it's not as hard as it looks! Lastly, be patient. Search engines operate in their own time and results can
take months to show. If this is an important area for you, consider enlisting a
professional which can save you a lot of time. However, there is a lot of
helpful resources and if you want to do the work yourself, roll up your sleeves,
work hard and watch the customers pour in every day. Mark Baartse is the
founder of Shopping Cart Reviews,
the webs most comprehensive Shopping Cart information site.
4 Ways To Use Quality Content To Increase Traffic To Your Website
There are multiple ways to drive traffic to your website. You can use pay per click, search engine optimization, email marketing, ezine advertising and many more.
Be Number One
The trick to making it REALLY big on the internet biz channel these days is to become an authority. It doesn't matter what the subject is, if you are THE authority on it, you'll be making money in no time!Imagine it, you want to become involved in the world of selling candle wax.
Inter-Linking Articles Strategy ? What You Need to Know
Webmasters have so much information available to them on the Internet about how to increase traffic to their web sites, but how do you keep visitors on the site when they get there? If you happen to use the articles format in order to provide interesting content for your readers, have you considered what they do when they finish reading one of your articles?Actions the reader will take, will include: navigating to another part of the web site (if you are lucky and have a well designed site); typing another web site address into their browser; and, closing down their browser and doing something else ? perhaps resuming their work after a lunch break. If you are a webmaster, the first of these would obviously be your preferred outcome.
How to Get Traffic
The future of online business rest in one word: traffic. No matter how great or sophisticated your website is, if nobody comes, your online business will fail.
Link Exchange: Good for Ranking and Internet Presence
To improve our website ranking and internet presence we need to exchange links with other websites. Some search engines won?t even spider websites that do not have links pointing to them.
Reciprocal Linking
Ideally you don't want to be in the position of having to email other webmasters asking if they're interested in reciprocal links. You want your website to be such that people will want to link to it, whether it be because of a cool feature, generous affiliate program, whatever.
A Million Visitors
Recently I came across a web site with the heading "How to get a million visitors without spending a dime in advertising." Unfortunately the web site didn't actually tell me how I could do that - that information was only available through an eBook sold on the site.
Got Traffic?
Here's what your website must have to get lots of traffic - links pointing to your site. The more you have, the more traffic you get.
Free Traffic Course - Day 3
This is the 3rd day of "Free Traffic Course".This day will be devoted to a very important strategy of getting free targeted web site traffic - link exchange.
Free Web Site Traffic - 10 Ways
How many ways can you get free web site traffic? Who knows, but here are some to get you started. Hopefully there will be one or two ways here that you haven't yet tried.
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