Increasing Visitor Flow to a Sluggish Website

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Web Marketing Today, Issue 34, June 25, 1997

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Your Web site has been up for six months now, but has yet to significantly impact your bottom line. What do you do now?

First, you need to analyze what is happening with your website traffic. You can usually obtain from your web hosting service an analysis of log files which tells you how many "unique hosts" (translate: separate visitors) your site has had during a specific time period. Next, you can determine which web pages received the most hits. These are the question you need to determine: Is our problem one of too few visitors? or the failure to convert the visitors we have into prospects or sales? Or a combination of both? In this issue we'll examine the issue of visitors. In the next issue we'll look at conversion rates.

Hits And Visitors

You know, of course, that hits and visitors are two different animals. If your log file shows 2,000 raw hits in a given week, that may represent only 100 to 200 visitors. A hit consists of a request for a web page or a graphic image. If you have six Web pages, and 13 different graphics on those six pages (multiple uses of the same image don't record as separate hits due to caching), one visitor could generate 19 raw hits if he looked at every page. 2,000 divided by 19 comes to 105 visitors. Now don't go counting graphics; this is just for demonstration. Insist that your ISP supply you with a log file analysis and then learn to read it.

You'd like to attract more than 105 visitors a week, of course. What are your options?

Getting to the Top

Every week people ask me: "How can I get my web pages to the top of the search engines?" No matter what the website promotion companies promise, no one can always be at the top of all the web search engines -- there are just too many competitors out there -- but you can improve your standing.

There's a certain amount of science involved in web search engine manipulation. To study it, look at some of the links in the promotion section of the Web Marketing Info Center. Loading repetitions of key words used to work, though now several key engines have algorithms which penalize for that. But a writing style which reuses keywords will usually produce a better than average hit rate. Learning how to use META tags gives you an advantage with some of the engines that utilize them. Clear and provocative page titles which show up between the TITLE tags on your web page will attract people trying to sift through dozens of search results on AltaVista or HotBot.

More Is Better

With 50,000 million web pages, how can you be found? Increasing the number of web pages in your site will increase the chance of you being found. Each carefully planned web page becomes another door of entry to your website. Multiple doors of entry definitely work. Just make sure you provide links to get to the other pages in your website.

Specializing is important, too. You may be a general insurance agent, but on the Internet few are searching for generalists. They can find those in their local phone book. They want to find someone who insures plastics factories or fishing boats. The lesson here is to emphasize your specialty on the Web. Yes, mention the other types of insurance you write, but emphasize your specialty. Or have a web page for each of your specialties, with a clear title for each specialty page.

The Most Important 25 Words

Writing that annoying 25 word sentence for Yahoo is a key. Load it with the keywords that people might actually search on. Don't waste precious words with marketing hype or throwaway words that will never find their way to the "search on" entry field at Infoseek or Lycos. Which of these sentences is better?

1. "Gordon Marine Insurance is your best choice for any kind of insurance that relates to vessels of all kinds. You imagine it, we insure it!"
2. "Insurance underwriting for all types of boats, ships, yachts, speedboats, fishing fleets, trawlers, freighters, tankers, and tugboats."

I see your point, you say, but you forgot to mention the name of the company in option 2. The company name appears in the title, I respond, don't waste words by repeating it in the sentence.

Of course, Yahoo is notorious for rewriting and abridging your best efforts, but by all means give it your best shot. In my opinion, paying a marketing-savvy website designer or website promoter a couple hundred dollars to help you write that sentence is money very well spent. Done right it can bring you hundreds of prospects; done poorly it can bring you few or none.

Scouring the Corners

You'll also want to work the niches on the Web where your prospects lie. If you sell Civil War belt buckle reproductions, become a regular contributing member of a reenactor's newsgroup or e-mail discussion list. You can look for these using Deja News (http://www.dejanews.com). You don't market in these groups by giving blatant plugs for your buckles, but by contributing to the discussion week after week. Let the 6-line "signature" at the end of every one of your messages speak for your business:

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     THE CIVIL WAR BUCKLE SHOP
 US and Confederate Civil War Buckles
Original Pieces and Authentic Replicas
    http://www.civilwarbuckles.com
----- girth@civilwarbuckles.com ------

Paying for Visitors

When the Web was young we all had dreams of attracting millions of people to our websites with no additional advertising. But that was then and this is now. The reality for many companies is that they need to plan an advertising strategy of driving people to their websites through carefully placed banner ads on appropriate high traffic sites.

I would stay away from the promotions that each of the innumerable directories offers right after your register your site. Some might help, but most are a waste of money. Ask, what are the interest areas of my best prospects? Then advertise where they congregate.

There are many other ways of marketing your site, such as reminders and newsletters, reciprocal links, Link Exchange, etc., but those I mentioned will get you started.

This all sounds like hard work, you say with disappointment in your voice. Sure, it's hard work. You didn't really fall for all that Internet hype the seminar speaker was dishing out last month, did you? But hard work strategically applied in the largest marketplace on earth can bring you a lot more customers than you currently have. Plan to work hard. Plan to spend some money strategically. And plan to succeed, with God's help.