Key #1  Make your website interactive.

As the internet continues to grow and evolve it’s becoming more important to create a community around your business. To accomplish this you want to engage your visitors and customers.  This can be accomplished a number of ways.  You can:

* Provide a forum
* Post surveys or polls
* Enable visitors and customers to review or rank items.  For example a “How valuable was this article?” question and a scale of 1 to 5 stars or a ranking from 1-10.
* Offer a blog and inspire comments and feedback
* Host contests and sweepstakes
* Publish video and audio content as well as written content.  This gives users another way to access you and your personality.

Key #2  Make sure your website provides value.

People go online for a number of reasons.  They go online to research a potential purchase, to seek solutions for a problem they’re having and to be entertained.  If your website provides all three; products, information, and entertainment then you’re in tip top shape.  The good news is your content can provide both the information and the entertainment and when written well, can also inspire purchases.  Here are a few ideas to provide value for your customers and prospects:

* How to articles, videos, and audio
* Tips articles, videos, and audio
* Case studies
* Workbooks and reports
* Interviews with experts
* Product reviews

Key #3  Make sure your website is easy to navigate.

It takes a visitor about 20 seconds to make a decision about whether they’re going to stay on your website or click away. If your site is laid out nicely, with products and services, information, prices, FAQs, and content easy to find then people are more likely to hang out – the longer they stay on your site the more likely they are to make a purchase or to return again.

To make your site easy to navigate consider:
* Keeping your site simple.
* Keep your pages uniform with the same options and appearance.
* If you have a lot of content, great!  Use drop down menus and organize your content by topic for easier access.
* Offer a search function where users can search for products, services, or content topics quickly and easily.
* Provide a way for users to easily go back to previous pages.  A back key is an option however if every page has the same options and drop down menus, including the ability to quickly return to the home page, a visitor will always be able to find what they need.
* Test your website’s appearance on different browsers to make sure every visitor has a good experience.

Key #4  Make your website easy on the eyes.

Ever visit a website and the text was so small or the colors so incompatible that you couldn’t read a word?  Readability is critical to a selling website.  Make sure:

* Your colors are easy on the eyes,
* Your graphics aren’t distracting
* And keep formatting like underlining, bold and italics to a minimum.
* Spacing between sentences and paragraphs is adequate
* Font size is large enough for people to read and font is easy to read

Key #5  Give them a soft sell.

People expect to be sold to and they’re looking for it – they’re wary.  Instead of hitting website visitors with a hard sell, provide information, solve their problems and show them the benefits of your products or services.  They’ll be much more receptive and appreciative.

Creating a website that sells requires a structured approach and a desire to create the best experience possible for your visitors.  Once you’ve created your website, consider testing it and asking associates, friends and family for their opinion.

Tip #1  Make sure you’re actually tagging your keywords.

Do you spend a lot of time optimizing your content and then neglect to tag them on your webpage?  Tags are where search engines look and if there are no tags they’ll pass right by your web pages.  Here’s a quick brief on tags.

There are a number of tag types including,

* Title tags. Title tags are quite possibly the most important place to situate your keywords.  Here’s what they look like – <title>Primary keyword phrase here. </title>

Your title tag is where you place your primary keyword or keyword phrase.  The sentence will describe your business in less than 90 characters.

* Header Tags. Header tags are next in order of importance to search engines.  They’re ranked in order of importance and look like this – <h1>Primary and/or Secondary keywords here</h1>

The “1” designates this header as the most important header on the page.

* Meta Tags. Meta tags provide the small descriptive text found underneath the title tag on the search engine results page.  Like title tags these should be kept brief, informative and up to date.

* Alt Tags. Alt tags are used to provide a text description of a graphic.  Each graphic on your site should have a description and an alt tag.

Tip #2 Add content to your site daily

Content is essential for traffic and a top search engine ranking.  Content is what search engine spiders look for and index – without it there’s nothing to index or rank.  Give visitors and search engines a reason to visit and index your site. Make a commitment to provide daily, optimized content and your traffic will soar.

Tip #3 Procure valuable and relevant incoming links

The more websites which link to your webpages the more valuable search engines perceive you to be, though not all links are created equal.  Search engines give more leverage to links from sites which are popular and credible and from sites which are relevant to your website topic.

There are different types of links.

- A direct link looks like a basic website address, for example, www.yourwebsite.com

- A text link occurs when the webpage address is embedded in the text.  Readers simply click on the link and are redirected to a new website page.

- If the link is to an internal web page, for example an article published on a website, rather than the home page, it is called a “deep link.”

You can encourage linking to your website by:

* Adding content to your site.
* Submitting to article directories.
* Publishing press releases.
* Blogging and participating in social networking forums, chat rooms and social networking sites.

Tip #4 Be Social!

Now more than ever before, internet marketing is about building a community.  Whether you offer a forum on your website or you participate in social networking sites, social networking is a valuable traffic generating tactic.  Sites like Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools for generating links and traffic to your site – create a profile and then post comments, links to your site and ideas which generate conversation.

Get involved – many chat rooms and forums are industry specific, find those which cater to your industry, and begin participating.  Speak to and connect with a highly targeted audience.

Tip #5 Advertise for more exposure and traffic

Advertising, when handled strategically, can be used to promote your content and products or services.  PPC advertising is often the tool of choice because you control the advertising budget on a daily basis and have the tools to test and track your advertising efforts.  Once you’ve honed your PPC ads the return on investment can be phenomenal in terms of traffic and purchases.

For maximum results, create a traffic and SEO strategy.  Outline your plan and your goals and then take the necessary action.  Take advantage of these five traffic and search engine tips to boost your business.