Attracting Traffic to your Web Site

Introduction

An ecommerce web site will not make any sales unless it attracts visitors. While this might sound obvious, it is surprising how many web site creators ignore the fact that attracting visitors is part of the site management strategy. Put another way – if you do nothing to attract visitors, the site will get no traffic.

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Getting Traffic

There are many ways to force traffic to your web site. Take, for example, the Revisitors service (www.revisitors.com), which was set up to divert traffic from expired domain names and search engines towards web sites. For a fee, they will literally push visitors to your web site.

Another way to expose visitors, and potential visitors, to your web site is to purchase advertising slots. These can be pop-up, pop-under, or inline adverts designed to pull the visitor in. This requires playing the percentages somewhat : only a certain proportion of advert viewers will visit your site.

The final set of techniques is the most reliable for attracting traffic, but is also the hardest to get right, and takes the longest to manifest its results. Submitting your site to search engines, and having them list your site high up in the results, for keywords targeted to your products, will attract high quality traffic.

The balance between pushing traffic through a service such as Revisitors, directly advertising to potential visitors, and search engine visibility is all that stands between the success and failure of a site to generate income. Luckily there are a few things that can be done to make the most of the traffic, and help attract even more.

Content is King

It is well-established that content is necessary to ensure that a web site provides value. If a site is purely a catalogue of products that can be purchased, then it is placing itself in direct competition with other catalogue based ecommerce operations, and that is a dangerous tactic.

However, content that is unique to the site creates trust, and helps to build traffic. If good and innovative services are combined with excellent content, and a recommend-me feature, traffic will be built through word of mouth. This kind of traffic is very valuable as it is the type most likely to generate sales.

Not only will the content keep visitors active and involved, whilst providing information, it also gives a good representation of the site that can be fed into search engines. In fact, indexing articles on a web site will ensure that the visibility of the site is increased in all major search engines.

However, the correct keywords need to be targeted. After all, the pages will only be seen by users searching for the content that is contained within them. So, the articles need to be direct and use active language, whilst being liberally peppered with key words and phrases.

As a brief aside; remember that using a content management system will greatly help in targeting, and re-targeting, article content. Storing the text in a database, and then creating pages on the fly is one of the best ways to keep a site fresh. This is best left to the experts to implement, but the web site owner needs to make sure that URL rewriting is included as a feature of the implementation.

URL rewriting is important because it removes all the query information, article indexing, and script extensions from the URL, replacing it with useful keywords. For example, an URL such as the following is neither user, nor search engine friendly:

   www.mysite.com/articles.php?query=what+is+URL+rewriting

The rewritten URL (or at least an example thereof) will be much more helpful in the quest to attract visitors:

   www.mysite.com/articles/what_is_URL_rewriting

It looks better, is easy to type and remember, and the keywords can be indexed by a search engine. It is a small feature to implement, but can reap large rewards.

Summary

So, in order to make sales, the site needs to attract visitors. This is equally true of affiliate stores, where sales are to a third party, as it is of own brand stores where the money is made from the products sold directly by the web store owner.

The most valuable visitors are repeat visitors, as tests have shown that they are more likely to buy goods than first time visitors. It is a question of trust, and quality content helps to attract visitors, build, and maintain that trust.

With the trust comes a predisposition to make a purchase, so long as the right products are advertised alongside the content. Making the most of product placement, combined with quality traffic, is key to the success of an ecommerce venture; but it all starts with traffic.

Further Reading on getting Ecommerce traffic

3 ways to increase ecommerce traffic