Put-Up-A-Site.com

When planning your first small business website, there are three essential questions you should ask yourself:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will your target audience find you?
3. How will you convert your visitors into sales?

These questions sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t bother…and then moan that “our website doesn’t bring us any business”.

1) Who is your target audience?

Give a great deal of thought to your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something - a product, a service, or an idea perhaps.

Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximise its potential. Ideally you should be aiming to create a niche.

2) How will they find you?

Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your site.

Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you. Actually do the searches yourself. Who comes up in the top 30? Because that’s where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

Those keywords - or keyphrases to be more accurate - need to be incorporated into your pages of your site - in the page titles, in the headings, and in the internal links.
Be specific with your keyphrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market. You may have to localise or specialise to get in that top 30 - and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your site. As I am sure you are aware from your own experience, if you haven’t found what you are looking for in the first 3 results pages, you look elsewhere.

The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages - that is pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth - where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords - especially in the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation - your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page.

3) How will you convert your visitors into sales?

Don’t just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they want it (yes, want - not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts - anything to get that dialogue started.

Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your home page - and preferably prominent on every one of your other pages. After all, it’s not a given that the home page will be the first page that the visitor sees, particularly if they have found you via a search engine.

Then make sure that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. And as we’ve discovered, they have to understand this pretty much instantly.

Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages - usually the “call to action” or purchase pages - and make sure all roads lead to those pages. Your internal links - like their external equivalents - should describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don’t call your products page “Products”, call it “blue widgets”, and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say “blue widgets”. This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, it will also lead your visitor to that all important conversion.

Now you have your new website and you are keen to start making some sales! But, how can you make sales if you do not have high volumes of traffic to your website?

One of the challenges which people starting a new online business face is that of getting traffic to their website. This article outlines four important steps you must follow to start generating some traffic to your website.

1. Have unique content on your website. Search engine robots look at all websites on a regular basis looking for sites with fresh and new content. It is therefore important for you to have fresh and high quality content which will get your website quickly indexed by search engines.

2. Have all your keywords on your website. It is important that you have all the relevant keywords and phrases that relate to your topic on your web pages and any articles you post on your website. This will increase your website ranking on search engines which means that your website will rank high when people type keywords relating to your topic on search engines.

You will therefore get many visitors coming to your site via the search engines. When people visit your website, the high quality content you have will make people spend more time on your site and ultimately buy some of the products or services you offer on your site.

3. Because your website is new, you must submit it to search engines. Submitting your URL to the search engines is an important step towards getting more visitors because it means your website will be visible from search engines. Having your website URL on search engines means that when people look for information relating to your topic on these search engines, they will find your website.

4. Exchange some website links with websites that have a high popularity rank (PR). Exchanging links with popular and related websites is an effective way to drive traffic to your website, and improve the raking of your site. You will get some traffic coming to your website through other websites that you have linked to.

By following the tips outlined in this article, you will realize that increasing your website traffic and getting more people to visit your new website is very easy to do. All you need to do is to follow these steps and you will soon see an increase in traffic to your website which will mean a lot of sales and online profits for your internet business!

I found a dynamite ebook on website setup and search engine optimization. It contains a bunch of info on how to build your website and what features to add in.

The SEO game is all about attracting spiders AND humans, and this book gives a lot of great advice. Written in a clear, no-nonsense way, “Advanced SEO Techniques” takes this huge subject and boils it down to the essentials.

If you can use some excellent pointers on tweaking your websites into peak performance, opt-it with your name and email address below and confirm the email message. It’s free!

Good luck and here’s to more traffic!!

 
Hi! Welcome to Put-Up-A-Site.com. As the name implies, this blog will be about building websites and blogs.

The internet is a fascinating and diverse network of millions of ordinary people just like you and me, who all have their passions, and who all have something to say to the world. That’s what is so extraordinary about it - the billions of pages and thousands of subjects.

One of my passions is playing pool and billiards. I also enjoy building websites. Another subject that interests me is the mind and mental well-being. Whatever the subject, there is information about it out there and there’s always room for more.

Check out my sites - http://www.pool-and-pocket-billiards-resource.com/, http://www.pool-for-beginners.com/, http://pool-is-cool.com/, and http://www.mentalwell-being.com/

Several years ago, after I had discovered the World Wide Web, I decided that I would like to have a website or two of my own. I found out that many people were making good money off the web and I wanted a piece of that too. How hard could it be?

Well, to an absolute beginner webmaster like I was, building a decent website was a lot more complicated than I thought. HTML, PHP, coding, FTP, and other mysterious subjects were beyond my understanding. I felt pretty overwhelmed even before I got started.

Luckily I came upon a site called SiteSell.com in my searches. SiteSell offered a complete website building service for absolute beginners like I was. They provide hosting, email accounts and auto responders, keyword tools, website building software, and a whole boatload more features that a webmaster needs for their site.

They provide a step-by-step website builder that coaches you through the proper way to build and optimize a site. Their tools make sure that your site’s pages will be well-setup and will score high rankings with Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines. Scoring well with the search engines brings in lots of traffic, which translates into lots of money if that is the type of site you want.

With all the tools, dozens of articles, free ebooks, and other tips and information SiteSell offers, it didn’t take long before I was building my own sites and building traffic. They provide a massive tutorial that is broken up into 10 “days”. Each day covers another aspect of building and/or search engine optimizing your website.

SiteSell offers all this and much more for one yearly fee. It is a one-stop-shop for just about all things website related. No need to get your hosting here, your domains there, your auto responder somewhere else, etc.

There is also a huge forum where questions and answers related to the ins and outs of site building are discussed. You name it and someone is there to answer your question.

I have now learned so much from building several sites this way that I can now build them from scratch, and all the acronyms (HTML, PHP, FTP, etc.) don’t scare me anymore. I enjoy building sites, and I enjoy the money they bring in.

If you have the desire to have your own website but don’t know the first thing about building them, I urge you to take a look at SiteSell.com. If you have a passion that you’d like to share with the world, turn that passion into a web business. There will never be a better time than now.