How To Get Customers On The Internet.

If you have a website already then you probably monitor the amount of traffic that visits it. There are many tools which you can use to do this such as Google’s free web analytics software. Many people just see the number of visitors and use that to judge how well the site is doing, however the number of visitors alone does not give a clear picture.

There are many more important factors to consider such as bounce rate, number of pages per visit, amount of unique visitors, which keywords people searched for to find your site, which page they were on before they left and also which page they arrived on. Each of these stats helps paint a bit more of the picture, and until you know all the details, you won’t truly know how well your website is doing.

A lot of the time people or businesses will have a website created and then just assume that customers will be able to find it, unfortunately this is not the way the internet works. There are several steps which need to be followed if people are to find your website. The main ones are to optimise the content of your website, it should include relevant text and titles about your chosen subject; once the content is optimised you need to tell the search engines that your site exists by submitting the URL for their approval; then you need to build links to your site from other related sites. There are obviously more steps which can help you with appearing on the search engines, but the above are the main ones.

Why is it so important to appear on the search engines? This is a question which is asked by clients a surprising amount, perhaps it is because they assume that once their website is finished people will flock to it directly or maybe it’s just because the internet is a bit confusing for some people who have not had much interaction with it. Whatever the reason for the question I often use a physical example to explain the importance. Imagine a shoe shop in a country lane with no signs up and no form of advertising to promote it, then imagine a shoe shop slap bang in the middle of a busy town’s High Street with a brand name and signs everywhere directing people to it. Which shop would you think is busier? Well it is obviously going to be the one in the town centre.

The reason being that more people are going to be able to find it, people will be in town for many reasons and will see the shop, they will see the signs telling them where it is and they can then tell their friends and family etc... Thus causing a snowball effect, however the country lane shoe shop will have to rely on the owner telling people exactly where the shop is, hardly anyone will stumble upon it. The search engines act as the High Street, they attract people for many reasons and some of these people will be looking for what you sell, having a high ranking on the search engines is like having a big brand name shop in the High Street. Put your shop in the right place and customers will find you, the same is true on the internet.

So how do you find the best place on the internet? Well you need to find the right keywords. For example you may have a shoe shop in London and therefore some good keywords would be ‘shoes in London’ or ‘shoe shop London’ once you have the keywords sorted you have a few options available.

You can either launch a pay per click campaign and pay the search engines a fee each time someone clicks on your link or you can get your pages optimised and appear in the natural search results. The later is the cheapest long term solution if done correctly it can yield far greater results than a pay per click campaign.

By: James Bevis

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James runs SEO London which is the home of one of the UK's leading Organic Search Engine Optimisation Companies. They focus on Online Promotion for websites which is vital for website owners who rely on targeted traffic to generate business enquiries. Contact us now for a FREE website SEO Report.