Together we have designed and launched a professional-looking web site that clearly presents your services or products. Now comes an important question: How can we ensure that your prospects will find it easily?

Of course, announcing your site through print, TV and radio will attract some visitors. But let us not forget the power and cost feasibility of search engines. After all, if people type in keywords that are specific to what you offer and find your site, you’ll have a pre-qualified prospect that just needs to be turned to a customer!

How to target qualified traffic to your web site?

Keywords

Using a search engine involves typing one or several words into a text field that the engine will then compare with those found within its collection of web pages. The more topic-specific keywords used, the narrower the search will be. The result is fewer pages being displayed, hopefully with the ones most applicable to your search.

It is for this reason that it is critical to evaluate what keywords will be used by your target market audience before writing the content of the site! Contrary to popular belief, simply adding keywords into the coding of your site is not enough to give you a prominent listing among search engine results. There is much more to it than that.

Search engine optimization

A search engine collects its web pages through the help of a “crawler” program that navigates web pages from link to link. The crawler reads the content of each page and is programmed to isolate what it thinks are the most important words to define that page. Unfortunately, the result of this thinking process can be different between search engines as they all have different programming approaches. But in general it is based on repetition—how often a word or phrase is repeated in grammatically correct sentences—and ranking location in the page—a word placed in the window title or a headline will have a better rank than one that is isolated into a paragraph.

The art of writing and building HTML pages so that crawlers will pick-up the right keywords is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Will that guarantee that you’ll always be at the top of the listings? No! But it will increase your chances. There are many other factors that will influence your position: “popularity” of your web site, non-uniqueness of your keywords, etc. But if you have a combination of three to four keywords that are distinctive from your competition, you may find your web site enjoying top prominence on search engines.

Pay-per-click keyword ads

Want to be the first listing displayed from a keyword search result? Be ready to pay for it! Have you ever noticed those “sponsored listings” that are displayed on top or on the side of search results pages? The way to be part of them is by investing some money for your keywords or group of keywords (called phrases). The more popular your keywords, the higher your bid to stay on top of a listing will be. But no matter how high or low the cost of your keyword phrase, you ultimately only pay when someone will clicks on your listing.

For businesses in very competitive markets, keyword ads are currently the best traffic marketing strategy. Through a combination of selective keyword phrases, well-focused ad writing and campaign adjustment based on daily analysis of performance reports, you can ensure that a click is a pre-qualified prospect!

Directory listings

Your web site URL should be listed in as many relevant directories as you can. As search engine spiders navigate them they will find your site and put it into their databases. It will also increase its “popularity” (the amount of relevant incoming links to a web site) and as such its “relevancy” to your keywords. There are three types of directories.

General Directories

Open Directory or DMOZ is a very popular directory that feeds its results to many search engines such as Google, AOL and Earthlink.

Specialty Niche Directories

They will provide more value in terms of link popularity than in actual traffic. However a user who finds a web site through a more narrowly focused directory is more likely to be a pre-qualified prospect.

In conclusion

Web traffic marketing is vital to the success of your online business, but remember: it is not the key to your sales, but rather, a great vehicle for driving qualified prospects to the web home of your business. Ultimately, the appearance, usability and content of your site will play a crucial role in transforming a pre-qualified prospect to a customer.