Sunday, June 7, 2009

Simple Ways to Increase Targeted Traffic to Your Website

By Ricardo d Argence

If you have built a business website, it will only be successful if you can get targeted website traffic to visit it and stay on it long enough to get your message and act on it.

It's a simple fact that the more time a prospective customer spends on your website, the more likely it is that he or she will take some sort of action specific to what you want to happen. A good way to ensure that this is going to happen is to encourage visitors to keep "clicking through" your website's pages. Here are four simple ways to increase page views and thus, the success of your business.

1. Content is king. You may have also heard this saying elsewhere, but it's doubly true on the Internet. Why? Because people are hungry for solid, real information that isn't simply trying to "sell" them something. Provide this to them, and they'll keep coming back for more. In addition, word-of-mouth can also bring others to your website simply because of the content you provide. And finally, search engines LOVE good, relevant content, which only increases your visibility. Provide good relevant content, and your site is sure to have solid, targeted traffic " and high visibility, too.

2. Copy should be simple and short. If you have difficulty writing short copy, work on it. Remember the acronym "KISS." Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Serve up the information in concise and easy-to-read chunks. Keep your paragraphs short. People have short attention spans on the Internet.

Dont expect them to read a several thousand word article. On the Internet people tend to scan articles for the information they need. They will only read an article from start to finish if the style and content are so good that they cant help but read everything.

3. Formatting and highlighting are key, too. Similar to sales copy, if you have headlines that pop and phrases that stand out, you're going to make your copy more interesting to read. If you have long chunks of plain, boring black-and-white text with no breaks, no headlines, no colors to break things up, people will be very likely to get bored and stop reading.

You can increase the time they spend on your site by highlighting all the keywords and keyphrases. Dont be afraid of white space, either. Generally speaking, highlighted text that is laid out with plenty of white space around it is attractive to the eye and helps the visitor to scan the page, which will be appreciated. Break up longer articles into pages that deal with different sections of your theme and invite the visitor to go to next page by posting a link at the bottom of each section.

4. Put a site map and some article "teasers" on your first page to encourage people to click through to each "teaser's" article and read more. (Site maps are also good for spiders as they crawl your pages, which in turn can increase your rankings with search engines.)

The above steps are very simple ways that will help people to find and visit you; if you use them, you'll also keep visitors coming back for more. This will give you more page views, more targeted traffic and better business success.

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