How do I get visitors to my website?

There are four basic ways to get traffic to your website. There are many variations on this theme but for the average small business there are most likely just these four:

There's so much information on the web about Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. What is it exactly? How does SEO get visitors to your site? Why is it important to do ongoing SEO work on your site? How long does it take? With all of the information available on the web and with a huge number of companies offering SEO services it's easy for a small to medium business to be overwhelmed, not to mention confused.

CRM Asia Solutions partner with expert SEO companies in Thailand and China to include SEO as part of your overall website and lead capture / conversion (CRM) strategy.

We are running a series of articles on the above four methods of increasing traffic to your website. We will start with the most important, traffic from search engines, Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO.

Search Engine Traffic - Cheapest and Best!

The least expensive way to get traffic to your site is through 'natural' or 'organic' searches. In order to get people to your site, from the keywords people type into Google, Yahoo and so on, you need to embark on an SEO program.

There is a plethora of SEO companies out there, including CRM Asia Solutions! However this is something the average small business owner or staff member could even do themselves with a little know how, but more importantly, time.

There are basically two parts to SEO: a) on page optimsation and b) getting links back to your site.

1. Webpage Optimization

Put simply, webpage optimisation involves making sure your webpages are set up correctly, focused on specific information and coded in a standardized and correct way, all of which will ensure that search engine 'robots' or 'spiders' will understand and index the page accordingly when they come through the internet and visit the page, an action known as 'crawling' the web.

You should include relevant headers, keywords and descriptions for all of your pages, the more focused the better. The content on these pages must be highly relevant to the main topic but not contain so many keywords that it gets penalised for spamming. And, where content is concerned: "content is king", the more quality content you have that is relevant to your topic(s) the better.

But webpage optimization is just half of the equation. The other half, and the harder task, is getting incoming links to your website.

2. Incoming Links to Your Site

Search engines give ranks to webpages which give the reader an indication of the 'importance' or relevance of that page with regards to its content. Pages are ranked higher the more links they have pointing to them. Links are considered by search engines, and let's face it: by people too, as a kind of a kind of recommendation that a site is relevant and worthy of a visit.

However, Search Engines are not stupid and are well aware of the less than honest practices of certain people who create 'link farms', purely to get more links to their sites so getting links from sites that Google considers trustworthy isn't easy. You need to start by submitting your site to various directories. Write great content that people want to read and that is worth linking to. Write articles that others would want to host on their sites, each with a link back to yours. Use blogging to get inbound links or alternatively contact similar sites to exchange links with other websites related to your industry. This is known as "reciprocal linking", it's not expensive to do but takes a lot of patience and time to build up a network of reciprocal links.

Combine a Website with other Business Tools to Increase Sales!

Achieving high website rankings in search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo etc. should be combined with an effective means of capturing people who read your contact and feel compelled to contact you.

By utilising the web-to-lead function in a CRM such as Zoho CRM you can reap the rewards of increased traffic and potential customer interest by capturing new leads directly into your CRM for sales follow up.

Effective design and ranking of a website combined with a CRM can greatly increase your business efficiency and revenue.

Search engine optimization will take several months to show any results. However, it is probably the most important means of getting people to your site and should not be skipped.

SEO is the essential basis for increasing the flow of traffic to your site and it is worthwhile investing time and even money in optimizing your website yourself or have a reputable SEO consulting company do it for you.

It is important to note though, that SEO by itself may not be enough to get you that all important traffic, at least not immediately.

To see immediate results you will need to set up a paid internet marketing campaign known as Pay Per Click Advertising, also known as Paid Search Advertising, which we'll consider in part 2 of this series of articles.

For more information on our SEO services and how your website, combined with effective an SEO strategy and a CRM can be used to your business advantage, feel free to contact us here.

CRM Asia Solutions
info@crmasiasolutions.com