How to Fuel Your Website Traffic

To build sales, you have to fill the pipeline with prospects. One place where prospects can come from is visitors to your website. But how do you get people to go to your site?

You might think the way is through ranking high in the search engines, but a recent study by WebSideStory shows that this is not how most people arrive at websites. The majority, 66%, of websites are visited through direct navigation (i.e. someone typed the web address into a browser), 21% of sites are found by following links, and only 13% of sites are found via search engines. This means that most website owners should focus their attention first on making their web address better known and used, then getting as many links to their site as possible, before working on their search engine ranking.

Making your website known

Old-fashioned marketing techniques can get your website known to more people. Along with including your website address in all advertising, you should make sure your address appears on:

• every piece of paper that your business puts out, including invoices and correspondence
• the signature of every employee's email
• marketing giveaways, like pens, calendars, and magnets

Making your website used

You want visitors even if they are not ready to be sold. If they visit, they might decide to remember your business for future needs, tell a friend about your business, or decide they need you after all. Provide a reason to visit your site beyond the sales pitch, like:

• free samples of your products or services
• free information about your industry, such as "top 10" lists, whitepapers, or "how to" articles
• tools your customers can use, such as calculators, formulas, or conversion tables
• links to information, resources, or tools on other websites

If you attend networking events or other meetings, you can talk about the extra value your website provides. People will visit your site who otherwise wouldn't bother. 

Getting links to your site

Linking is the power of the web as evidenced by that 21% referral rate. You can leverage this power by:

• asking your vendors and business partners to link to your site or to that great free information you just added
• finding out if you can have your site listed on the websites of the organizations you belong to
• getting an article (along with that link to your site) in online publications
• listing the links to your competitors and finding which of those will also link to your site (entering "link:www.website.com" into Google will generate a list of links to that site)

Beware of "link farms" or businesses selling "thousands of links to your site." While having a good number of links is helpful, poor quality links will not bring you legitimate sales prospects.

"If you build it, they will come" might work for baseball fields, but not for websites. Owners who take positive steps to build traffic will get results in their numbers of prospects and resulting sales.