Web designers, programmers, IT specialist and business marketing departments are all involved in the development of wonderful, and functional web sites. However, few of these professionals are able to understand the ways to get your website to rank in search engines and how important that can be your website sales.
If you want to increase website traffic, you need to see if your site makes any of these website mistakes and then take action to correct them.
1. Flash Home Page / Web Site
Nothing stops a search engine spider crawling through your website than no readable content. Flash pages can be great for paid traffic. However for organic rankings, learn to integrate readable content onto your pages. This is where a skilled content marketer can come in handy as writing website content for SEO purposes can be very different than conversational type writing.
2. Poor Content
Search engines use the content on your website to help determine what your company does. Try this quick test. If you read your web page copy to a complete stranger, would they know what type of industry you were in? If the answer is 'no', you need to revise your copy, because the search engines won't know what industry your business is in either.
3. Calls To Action / Next Steps
For some reason, a lot of web sites are built without a logical calls to action or "next step" thought out. What is the logical step that your web page has set the user up for? How does this page fit into the conversion path that leads the customer to a sale? Review your site and see if your visitors are lead towards a conversion path or are left to choose their own path.
4. Search Engine Friendly URLs
Many programmers build amazing dynamic web sites and never consider how or why it is important to rank in search engines for specific terms, whether it is your products or services. One solution is to use re-writes to create search engine friendly urls that can improve indexing and have been shown to have higher click through rates. However, using a full service Digital marketing and web development company such as Sales & Marketing Technologies, can prevent these from being an issue as we work side by side with the web developers to ensure all URLs and meta information is fully optimized for site launch.
5. URL Server Set Up
How your URL is set up on the server can impact your rankings, and the use of proper 301 redirects are critical when re-launching your web site. It is important that your IT expert and hosting company understands proper set up.
You now have some insight into how to increase your web site traffic and may have identified areas where your website and your business can improve. If you are looking for a more in-depth analysis and understanding of how to improve your website's success, contact Sales & Marketing Technologies.