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Design Your Site for Traffic in 2005
By Elizabeth McGee

What better way to start the new year than with more traffic to
your web site. Web traffic is a critical part of your internet
business and it is imperative that you design it to bring you
the most amount of traffic possible.

Designing your site for traffic includes offering good content,
easy navigation and a logical flow. Additionally you must also
build your site to draw traffic from the search engines because
if you can obtain high search engine ranking, you can enjoy free
traffic.

It's important to note, however that good ranking won't do you
much good without a well designed site and a well designed site
can't bring you visitors if no one knows it's there. Both high
ranking and good design need to work together.

How do we pull all this together? Let's take a look.

                 -A Word About Design-

A huge mistake I see many website owners make is that they
get caught up in making their site cute. They love the little
animations, buttons and dramatic backgrounds. What they fail to
consider is that these things are worthless if you don't offer
good content, easy navigation and a logical flow.

First of all don't try to be everything to everyone. Design
your site around a theme, preferably a niche theme. Don't
confuse your readers with links all over the page. Design a
logical flow. Lead your viewers to where you would like them
to go. Leave plenty of white space and keep your pages
organized. Clearly state at the top of your pages what you
are about and what you would like your viewers to do.

Secondly, I don't recommend pop-ups. I find that the majority
of internet users find them annoying. The demand for pop-up
blockers is a good indication that viewers don't want to see
them.

Thirdly, offer good content. Provide information on your site
that will help viewers solve a problem. Offer information that
they might not get elsewhere. Write reviews regarding your
products. Write newsletters and articles and most importantly
offer something of value for free. Give your viewers a reason
to come back. It will also build trust in you.


                    -Traffic Builders-

Good search engine ranking can bring lots of visitors to your
site. It often takes a few months to rank well but the payoff
is lots of qualified traffic. While it's not practical to depend
solely on search engines for traffic it can complement your other
advertising campaigns nicely. Aiming for high search engine
placement is always a plus.

Keep these in mind when developing your site for the search
engines:

- Domain Names
   Choose a domain name that has your site keywords in it. For
   example, if you're a site about pet care, try to include
   the words "pet care" or words related to pet care in your
   domain name if you can.

- Keywords
   Keywords require research and there are several tools to
   help you out in this area. Here are my favorites:

   http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
   http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

   I suggest focusing on only one keyword or keyword phrase
   per page of your website. This may not seem like a lot but
   if your site has 20 pages you can focus on 20 keywords.
   Each page should be considered a landing page for your site.
   If you have proper navigation on your pages, it will easily
   allow viewers to see everything you have to offer.

   Include your keyword or keyword phrase at the top of your
   page as well as in at least one header phrase. Also work
   the keywords into the body of your text as often as you can
   without sounding redundant.

   Your keywords should be in the Title tag as well as in
   your page description tag. Many search engines no longer
   look at the keyword tags, but I recommend using them and
   including the plural forms as well.

- Alt Tags
   Search engines don't index images, therefore any text on
   your site that is presented in image format won't get indexed.
   To solve this problem, you can enter the image description
   in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize
   all the content on your site, fill in your ALT tags with
   your keywords. This will boost your keyword frequency and
   help your site achieve better ranking.

- Linking
   Search engines will rate your site by who is linking to
   your site, so it's important to establish quality, related
   links. This can be accomplished in a few ways. One way is
   to establish reciprocal links with other like sites. When
   exchanging links be sure to include your keywords in your
   site title.

   Review the page you are exchanging links with. Be sure it
   is a site that you find easy to navigate and informative.
   I also recommend that the site's index page have a Google
   PR rating of at least one. This ensures that the site is
   not being penalized by Google. If it is a penalized site
   then you could be penalized as well for linking to it.

- Include a 'tell a friend' and 'bookmark' script on your site.
   This gives viewers an easy way to bookmark you and most of
   all return to your site.

- Include a Site Map
   Site Maps let visitors know what information you have, how
   it's organized, where it is located with respect to other
   information, and how to get to that information with the
   least amount of clicks possible.

   Site maps also provide spider food for search engine robots.
   This can increase your chances of becoming indexed because
   a site map allows the search engines to easily visit every
   page of your site.

   A site map works best if you include a link to your site map
   in the navigation of every page on your site.

Finally, don't let your site become stale. I have found that
my search engine rankings improve when I periodically add new
pages to my site and keep the content new and fresh. Follow
these tips and 2005 may be your year for traffic.

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Elizabeth McGee has spent 20 years in the service and support
industry. She has moved her expertise to the world wide web
helping businesses find trusted tools, enhance customer service,
build confidence and increase sales. You can visit Elizabeth's
sites at: http://www.homenotion.com  http://www.pro-marketing-online.com
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