Tips For Small Businesses

Are you constantly banging your head in frustration on not receiving all the internet traffic you would like to get to your web site? Are you tormented from information overload listening to all the latest free website traffic tactics and not being able to understand any of it? Are you dejected of people trying day and night to harassing you to max out your credit card and get loans for Google clicks, and in the process loose your credit score? Are you stupefied by the way your website just dropped out of the Google search results? Or are you just too broke and all you have to rely on is getting some free website traffic tactics?

You can employ website traffic tactics without spending dime. However, knowing how is the real deal. Here's the score:

1. Link it
Of all the effective website traffic tactics that can get you best results, linking to and from other websites is the one of the most widely-used method. Just make sure that the Internet business you are exchanging links with is relatively if not utterly related to your own business. And of course, don't overkill as this might ban you from search engines.

2. Meet Meta Tags
Another way of to acquire your desired traffic for your website is through having your Meta tags contain usually used keywords that target your business. Meta tags help search engines in describing your web page. If you're quite adept with the HTML aspect of your web pages, manipulating your meta tags would be a breeze.

3. Keyword-rich AND sensible content
Writing or acquiring articles that provide solid information regarding your business is one of the best ways. Making use of free keyword suggestion tools such as Overture will help you on which keyword or phrases to work on to better lead more traffic to your website. Making these write-ups very readable and genuinely informative will make you many repeat visitors to subsequently become repeat clients.

Submitting these articles to various article directory listings will provide more visibility for your business as long as you keep your resource box in tact to create for yourself numerous back links.

These methods, if employed properly, will not only make your web site popular but will make you achieve your most desirable result - higher conversion rate.

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox
When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers -- all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)
Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys
Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games
Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content
Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using looping audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Keyword density is defined as the number of times your keyword appears in your content as opposed to the number of words in the content. In other words, if you have a web page with 1,000 words on it and you use your keyword 200 times on that page then the keyword density will be 20%.

If your keyword density is 20% then it’ s way too high.

What you need to understand about keyword density is that there is no optimal density that will ensure your web pages get indexed by the search engines. Search engines look at hundreds of criteria and none of them are more important than all the others; that said, some of them are more important than others. Keyword density falls in the middle of the pack - not super important, but somewhat important.

Keywords, you are probably aware, are very important. Try building a website without them. What are people going to search for? How are they going to find you? But do you need to spend your time trying to figure the exact number of keywords to use for your page? No. And the reason is pretty simple. It all really boils down to the avoidance of the two biggest sins regarding keywords:

1. Not enough

2. Too much

As an SEO experts I will tell you that the optimal keyword density is 3%-5%. There are other factors at play. Those other factors are the hundreds of other search criteria measured by the search engines in their algorithms.

The most important thing to know about keywords is to use them naturally. Your website content should be written in such a way that keywords don’ t seem forced. If you start every sentence with your keyword, the content will look choppy and unnatural. You don’ t want that.

On the other hand, if you don’ t include your keywords enough then you likely won’ t rank well enough in the search engines to get the kind of traffic you want. So I always tell people to write naturally just they were talking to a friend. After you have written a great web page without thinking about your keywords, go back through and think of where you can place your keywords without making them seem forced and unnatural. Then, start working on building your off-page SEO.

Ten Common SEO Mistakes Made on Database Driven Websites...

1. Pages with duplicate content - not enough differential areas within the pages, so that only small areas of the page change from page to page. Search engines must see an appreciable difference between one page and the next.

2. Pages with duplicate page titles - the page title is a great indicator to the search engines of the primary content of the page. Change it for each page!!  Make it unique to that page.

3. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions - See: #2. Should have different meta data relative to the premise of the page.

4. Using auto-generation of pages as a shortcut instead of creating good content. This is linked quite closely to point 1, where it is possible to create pages that have only a tiny percentage difference between them. Unique information about the subject of the page will immensely help both the long tail and the ability of the search engines to determine that a page is valuable.

5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links - potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.

6. Too many query strings - this is a common bugbear of the professional SEO, where complicated database selections create deep levels of pages, but with seven or eight &id= type strings. Additionally, some bad development methodology can leave pages with null query strings that appear in every URL but don't do anything. The answer to this is generally URL rewrites, creating much more search engine friendly and user-friendly URLs!

7. Putting query strings in different orders when accessed through different places - this can create duplicate content issues, which can cause major penalties.

8. Not using user language to generate automated pages - if you are going to create a database driven website that uses words in the query strings (or better in rewritten URLs) make sure that you use words that will help you with SEO - if you sell widgets, make sure you are using the word widgets somewhere in the URL instead of just product= or id= - keyword research can assist with this.

9. Not allowing the meta data and title to be edited easily after the site build. It is possible to hardcode the generation of meta information into a database that doesn't allow it to be edited later. Creating a mechanism for modifying this information initially helps everyone at a later stage when the information needs changing without shoehorning it into an already developed structure.

10. Creating keyword stuffed pages by using auto-generation. Once upon a time, search engines quite liked pages with high densities of your keywords, but now these are likely to get you marked down rather than up. So be aware when creating pages that long pages with lots of your products on can create too high a density. For instance listing blue widgets, light blue widgets, navy blue widgets, sky blue widgets is going to create a page with a very dense page for the phrase "blue widgets".

These are just 10 of the most common potential optimization pitfalls when creating dynamic websites.

Your website is a direct representation of your business and should be created in a way that accurately reflects that. If you are a fun, whimsical company that caters to individual orders, then make your site fun and playful. If you are a company that focuses on the corporate orders, you will need a site that is professional and informative.

Important aspects of a successful site:

- Make sure your address and telephone number are easily located. People like to know whom they are ordering from and that if there is a problem, they can get in touch with you.

- Studes show that customers will not wait long for a site to load.  They will quickly move to the next website that Google tells them to. Customers are shopping online to make it quick and easy. They should be able to find what they need right away.

- Make it easy for customers to get around (or navigate) your site.  They should not be confused or lost on your site.

- Create a site with a simple, light colored background. Studies show that customers are more receptive and willing to stay on sites that are light colored.

- When it comes to your product pictures, it is important that they are clear and professional looking.

- Keep the ordering process easy!! Make sure that your shopping cart is easy to navigate and that there is no way to misunderstand the ordering process.

You have Google Adsense or some other Pay Per Click Publisher. It is straightforward enough to reason that having people click onto more pages helps your revenue immensely. How do you get your visitors to read more than one page when they visit?

1. Create pages within your website that contain reference materials you refer to often. Static pages will get crawled and indexed by the search engines and as you write about your topics you can refer people to these static pages as references.

2. Refer to other posts you have made on your blog or on another one of your blogs while posting. This gets the reader to click over to previous posts. These archives are not to be forgotten.

3. Write your post as normal, and then decide where you want to break the post up onto a new page. You put the more tag in and readers have to click to a new page to read “the rest of the story”.

4. Use content from other websites you have blogs to get more pageviews for all of them. Use the target new tag and refer to material on your other sites. It will open a new window leaving the current site open while they visit your other website or blog. You can quickly double up your pageviews while also introducing your readers to your other websites.

5. Make a list of 10 previous posts and the links to those posts. Make a post in your blog about 10 things you want your readers to know and read in case they have not done so before. At your suggestion they will at least go see if they have read those posts before, increasing your pageviews once again plus bringing old material to new readers. That also lets them know they should browse the archives for things they have missed.

6. using that same list of 10 posts or a new one, visit other blogs on your topic. Find posts that talk about something similar to one of those 10 posts, then instead of adding a link in your signature to the home page, make a comment there and refer to the post that is similar and that contains helpful information to that blogger and their readers. You will also be increasing your link popularity while doing this. Do not spam the link. Make sure it actually contains useful information. Don’t be trolls or spammers and you will end up with new readers and more page views for your blog.

When you create a WMV movie using Windows Movie Maker, Windows Media Encoder or any of the dozens of video editing apps supporting WMV, you have a number of options for sharing your video. The widest audience is obviously online. Windows Movie Maker includes a rather deceptive Save to the Web option, which really means, "save to Web if you have an account with Neptune Mediashare." You don't need to use Neptune or the Save to the Web option to in Windows Movie Maker to share your videos online.

There are two primary ways to share a WMV file online: direct download or streaming playback. A third option would be to offer the video as an RSS subscription, which is loosely related to direct downloads and gets covered in another article. When you offer a direct download, users click on a link to the video file and either view the video in their desktop Windows Media Player or save it to their hard drive. To stream a Windows Media video file, you need to embed the Windows Media Player in the page where you post the video. This requires some specific HTML code included in the page or blog post where the video is linked.

There are some potential headaches to this method, like support for browsers like Firefox and Safari. Mac users don't have Windows Media Player installed by default and Safari issues a nasty warning message with no link to the resolution on Macs without Windows Media Player. Internet Explorer handles embedded Windows Media files nicely, which is to be expected since it's also a Microsoft product. For broad compatibility with all browsers, it's best to stick with the version 6.4 embedded player (which has nothing to do with the version of desktop player the user might have installed).

There are certain things every embedded Windows Media Player needs to function properly, along with a long list of optional parameters. Each embedded player instance on your Web page needs the object definition to clarify which version of the Windows Media Player will be called. This is identified by both the CLSID reference and the CODEBASE definition. For the 6.4 version of the embedded player, an will look like this (the width and height may be different depending on your actual movie size):

<object id="MediaPlayer" width=320 height=286 classid="CLSID:22D6f312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95" standby="Loading Windows Media Player components..." type="application/x-oleobject" codebase="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#Version=6,4,7,1112">

The one required parameter is the location of your movie, which is defined using the "filename" parameter:

<param name="filename" value="http://yourdomain/yourmovie.wmv">

Some optional parameters include showing the Windows Media Player controls and whether the movie will start automatically. If you use the Showcontrols parameter, keep in mind your movie height needs to be 46 pixels bigger than the movie so your file doesn't get scrunched. A movie with a height of 240 would need to have a height reference of 286 to display accurately.

<param name="Showcontrols" value="True">
<param name="autoStart" value="True">

The final part of the implementation is the embed statement which includes the application you are embedding and a link to your video file like this:

<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" src="http://media.pmcmovies.com/SixtiesLove.wmv" name="MediaPlayer" width=320 height=240></embed>

The finished code looks like the example below, which you can copy for your own site and simply replace the links to your movie file where appropriate and adjust the necessary height settings.

<object id="MediaPlayer" width=320 height=286 classid="CLSID:22D6f312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95" standby="Loading Windows Media Player components..." type="application/x-oleobject" codebase="http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/mplayer/en/nsmp2inf.cab#Version=6,4,7,1112">

<param name="filename" value="http://yourdomain/yourmovie.wmv">
<param name="Showcontrols" value="True">
<param name="autoStart" value="True">

<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" src="http://media.pmcmovies.com/SixtiesLove.wmv" name="MediaPlayer" width=320 height=240></embed>

</object>

If you own a content-based websites, you should turn every webpage possible into subscriber snatching devices for you. The good news is that not only is this method extra effective, it is just as extra effortless when it comes to applying the concept.

Since visitors can come and leave without remembering your website in the future (which is very likely to happen), you can still follow up with your visitors easily by seeking their permission to opt into your mailing list through your web pages – on autopilot!

You can create a pop up window to appear after your visitor attempts to close the window or leaves your website, asking for your visitor’s name and email address so that you can follow up with him or her in the near future via subscribing to your mailing list for free.

This way, you can convert a big portion of your visitors into subscribers, giving you a chance to follow up with them on other offers you may have in the future.

Alternatively, you can insert an opt-in form within the spaces of your web pages. This method is effective, especially if you are afraid of Internet users who have pop up killers installed in their web browsers, set to block any pop up windows.

Turning every webpage you own into subscriber snatching devices with little effort can be responsible for huge subscriber-pulling results, and is a smart tips for smart businesses.