Increasing site traffic

[dick dastardly]

Hi, just a quick question to all you IT guys.

I'm on an assignment for a small software company (dealing mainly with B2B help desk and facilitating packages) where i have to look into ways of increasing the traffic to their site.

Apart from using googel adwords, which has given poor results, they haven't really tried anything else. Can anyone point me in the direction of how to increase traffic? Are there any sites/forums where potential customers visit where advertising or a presence may be worthwhile?

Thanks in advance, DD (not very technically minded or computer literate)

[dick dastardly]

well, I had to work it out for myself.

If I get fired tomorrow for incompetence then I'm holding you quiet lot responsible

[bigtone]

If you're looking to bring in search engine traffic, a SEO company is what you need. We're using NetBooster (www.netbooster.co.uk) who are optimising certain pages on our sites and submitting them to search engines with particular phrases that they can look into before hand to see how well they do.

It's not a cheap exercise, but the site traffic increase is showing the results, so it may be worth a go.

Tony

[sjgardner]

You could also try www.submitfire.com as well I've had good results from them

[miniman]

The key is reciprocal linking. The more sites that link to you, the better your results will get in the search engines.

[JamieBeeston]

There are many ways, some ethical, some not so ethical, and some downright unethical.

Unfortunately, the magnitudes of success tend to be directly related to the unethical nature.

However, thats just GETTING you traffic, getting traffic is ok, but what you really want it targetted traffic.. thats alot better.

It all depends on what your selling and to whom.

Whilst i am not a fan of the unethical bulk mailers, they certainly do work ;(

I used to host someone, who it later transpired was bulk mailing. They ended up stopping as they got hammered by Oftel for what they were doing, I didnt actually find out what they were doing until later..

but when I spoke to their techie guy, he said that their once a week mailout, to several million people, was netting them £100k a week on average, in premium rate fone calls (one of those GetaMateIrate sites, calls your mate and says 'you Kicked my Dog' etc.

got me thinking tho... just how successful a bulk mail can be.

then I slapped myself and said 'No... Norty' and carried on with the day

[davidd]

JamieBeeston said:

There are many ways, some ethical, some not so ethical, and some downright unethical.

As I've said before search engines are a bit of a black art. And as Jamie has pointed out, driving the traffic is one thing, driving good traffic is another and retaining it is quite something else.

We worked hard to get our ratings up on google, seach on 'internet engineers' and we are number 1 in the world, shame no one searches for it. Search for systems integration cambridge and we are number one. Not that we see much traffic but it cheers me up

It is key to ensure that your website url is included on everything that you send out, franking machine, letterheads, all promotional stuff, email footers etc, etc, etc. Do not expect people to know where you are, tell them.

Also encourage interaction on your site and look at the site stats, see where visitors come into the site, what pages they visit, links they click on etc. Use this info to tune your site, if folks are not going to a page why? Is the navigation shit? Is the content irrelevent? Change things.

Also make sure you submit your site on a regular basis, we have a tool to do this called submit wolf, I'm not sure how effective it is but it does mass submits and also does a link exchange thing.

and don't forget linking from other sites.
Good luck

D.

[polar_ben]

www.google.com/search?q=ben+saunders&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=

edit to add:

I've learnt a bit about this recently. Google likes a high content to code ratio. I coded my site in xhtml, and all the styling is on a separate .css sheet, meaning there are no table or font tags.

You can see the content to code ration of any site here - www.holovaty.com/tools/getcontentsize/ - my site averages around 40%.

Interestingly, the site's only been up for a fortnight or so, and if you search for things like "using pioneering technology" my site comes up in the first few...

>> Edited by polar_ben on Friday 17th October 09:32