Drive Maximum Traffic to Your Website at Minimum Cost

Carol, who owns a successful gardening store, launched a Website last year to sell her garden supplies directly to consumers. She hired a designer to build a good-looking site for her. But after a few weeks, she noticed that only a trickle of people were visiting her site every day.

So Carol signed up with a pay-per-click Internet advertising service and within a few days, dozens of people were coming to her site every day. That seemed positive until a month later, Carol realized that she had just spent $3,354 for pay-for-click advertising that generated only $24 in sales.

"A lady in Illinois bought a garden hose," Carol explains. "I never lost three thousand dollars on a garden hose before."

Stories like Carol's are nearly enough to make you abandon the idea of selling online. But the fact is, you can promote your product or service virtually free over the Internet and drive hundreds of people to your site without having to pay for pay-per-click or banner advertising on other Websites.

The key to getting visitors for free is to revise your site using SEO - an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. With an effective SEO rework of your site, your Website can grab a top-five ranking in any of the major search engines.

An Art and a Science

To put SEO to work for you, you need to get inside your customers' minds and understand how they might use search engines to reach you: which keywords, or two-to-three word phrases, they would be most likely to use when searching on Google or the other search engines for your specific product or service.

You then make sure that you utilize those keywords or phrases extensively in your Website (in the title if possible, in page headers, in your page text and in the hidden codes that create your page) so that when surfers enter them into search engines, your site gets listed near the top.

If you were promoting vacations to China, for example, two very relevant search terms would be:

• "Asia travel," which generates approximately 4,896,429 searches per month
• "China travel," which generates approximately 3,081,393 searches per month

You might need to hire a consultant to improve your site's SEO. However, you can also takes steps on your own to improve it, depending on your knowledge of how Websites are put together. Another idea is simply to have your site designer build the keywords you want to test into your Website, and then see whether they improve your traffic.

Remember, your company name is not a keyword and has no relevance. If consumers know your business name, they will likely know you and your Website.

Showing up in the first position for a highly used search term with a well-written description of your product or service can result in amazing numbers of site visitors - and great sales. But to achieve results like that, you need to spend time to understand your potential customers and the terms they would be mostly likely to use when searching for your product or service.

Once they arrive on your site, you have to make sure it is doing a great job of selling to them. For advice on making that happen, I would encourage you to read my Trump blogpost of August 4, 2006, "If You Build It, Will They Buy?"

Richard F. Guyon is CEO of NEXRUN Technologies and CTO/SEO Advisor to Global TESOL College. Richard also designed the World Trade Center Memorial Tribute site. To thank Richard for his contribution to the World Trade Center Memorial Tribute site, the New York Fire Department invited him to march with them in New York this September 11th. We are proud that Richard is part of the Trump Universitycommunity.