our creative process : web design
getting visitors to your site
Hundreds of books have been written about the art of Search Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), cornerstones of the rapidly changing and arcane practices of getting visitors to come to your site. Contrary to received wisdom, if you will build it they may not necessarily come, and if they do a significant number will come by way of a search engine.
If all it took was simply launching a new web site to drive thousands or millions of visitors to your site there would be a whole lot more dot com billionaires in the world. In truth the vast majority of web sites –even some very well known consumer facing sites--attract a relatively modest number of unique visitors per month.
Even if we could cover everything you need to know about search engines and how organic (generally free) and paid search work, the fact is that the major search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others are constantly updating their algorithms and rules. With billions of dollars in revenue at stake, they have a vested interest in maintaining control over Internet search. That said, our search engine experts know a great deal about the rules and practices that give one site an edge over its competitors in search engine rankings, and even more about the no cost, low cost and paid mechanisms that can be employed to increase traffic to your site.
Gross tonnage –the sheer number of visitors who visit your site is only one measure of success and while important (visitors can’t use, buy, or learn anything about you if they don’t come to your site), there are other metrics that matter as much. Just as important as the total number, are the quality of visitors to your site. Which would you rather have: ten thousand unique visitors per month that yield 500 leads or sales; or four thousand visitors that result in 900 customers? The answer is obvious but even more compelling if it costs your organization significant dollars to drive that additional traffic to your site.
Proven search practices begin at the most fundamental stage of design. As a rule search engines look at four basic parameters (and dozens of other factors) in determining your site rank:
- Relevance: how closely the content of your page (site) matches the terms of a search query
- Prominence: how your page/site are composed, the position and placement of page components and content
- Links: the number, ranking and quality of unique content appearing on
sites that link with yours - Frequency: how often content on your site is updated and refreshed
Basic issues such as how your site is composed—the use of more recent technologies such as CSS, Semantic html, Ajax, and Java Script can all affect your search performance. The next layer is your content. Here we look at the effective use of keywords, image tags, meta tags and other contextual hints for the search engine spiders that will crawl and index your site.
Web technology provides a wealth of tools to monitor in great detail every aspect of a visitor’s behavior while on your site, even which sites they came from and where they go when they leave your site. From the outset, during our analysis process, we’ll identify what those metrics are and ensure you have the information you’ll need to increase desirable behavior.
Once we’ve addressed those elements we’ll focus on in-bound linking; the number, popularity and type of sites with unique content that link to your site. Finally, we’ll work with you to identify external drivers—other media and tools you can and should deploy to create awareness of and grow traffic to your site, such as social media, mass customization, texting, video, and others.
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