Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Diabetic Corner

How to Attract Qualified Sales Leads to Your Website
There are many ways to increase your website traffic, but traffic really is not the key. The key factor is trying to get qualified sales leads and customers. I would rather get 25 people that are actually looking to purchase a new website than 2500 people that are not. Listed below are some of the ways you can get the kind of visitors you want. I will however, keep the descriptions short as I will be writing a full article about each one of these topics in upcoming months. Keep in mind that some of these techniques will not work for every business but most will. TRY THEM, THEY WORK! 1. YOUR PAGE TITLES. Your page titles should be short and descriptive and should be 5 to 8 words. This is a safe amount for all search engines and will insure people searching for your website will be able to read your page title when the search engine results are displayed. This is a very important tag for search engine placement. Your title should be in the header of your HTML code and should look something like this.
Web Site Promotion - Increasing Your WebSite Traffice
2. KEYWORDS AND PHRASES. Look at every one of the pages in your website and prepare a list of keywords and key phrases that go along with the content of each page in your website. If they end up to be the very similar, simply rotate them so that you don't have the same keywords in the same position on every page. So many people make the mistake of placing keywords on their first page and no where else. Your keywords should be different on every page of your website. You should also be careful not to repeat any words more than 3 times and you should not have more than 30 keywords in your page. Your keywords should also go in the header section of your HTML page and should be in a meta-tag that the search engines can read. If after a while you are not getting the traffic you expected try changing your keywords and resubmitting to the search engines.
"KEYWORDS" content"promoting, promotion, Website promoting,"
3. PAGE DESCRIPTION. Write a precise description of every page in your website using as many of the keywords that you prepared in step 2. Try to leave out as many filler words as possible, like if, that, is, are, to leave more space for the keywords. This is the description that the user will see when the search results are displayed. The description will also be placed in the header section of your HTML page. And again will be in a meta-tag. Your description should be about 200 to 250 characters in length.
"DESCRIPTION" content"Increase your Website traffic using, meta-tags, descriptions, and effect page titles"4. PAGE CONTENT. Your page content is also very important to search engine placement. The content of your pages should be keyword rich and should be about the same subject of the keywords and phrases in your meta-tags. Don't try to fool the search engines, it will only hurt your placement. Again try to leave out as many of the filler words as you can saving more room for the important words and phrases. Your page design should not include frames, to date there are only 2 search engines that understand frames, the rest don't. 5. SUBMIT YOUR PAGE TO THE SEARCH ENGINES AND DIRECTORIES. There are so many search engines in many different countries, among the largest are Alta Vista, Infoseek, HotBot, Excite, Lycos, just to name a few. There are also many services on the net that will charge you to submit your site to all these search engines ranging from $25.00 to $250.00 dollars. WHY PAY for something that you can do yourself, FREE. Unless you really don't have the time, I would recommend using this service here: http://www.addme.com/submission.htm Fill in one form and this script will submit your site to 30 search engines. Do this once a month or every other month to keep the search engines up to date with changes to your pages. 6. SUBMIT YOUR PAGE TO YAHOO. Yahoo is the most important and a highly visited directory on the internet. This is probably the single most important submission you can make, however it must be done manually unless you have expensive software to do just that. Instructions can be found at Yahoo. http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/include.html
7. REQUEST LINKS ON SITES THAT PERTAIN TO YOUR INDUSTRY. Search for sites that support your industry, such as trade organizations and suppliers. Write the webmaster a nice letter or email asking for a reciprocal link to your site and in return put a link on your site to theirs. 8. INCLUDE YOUR URL ON STATIONERY, CARDS, AND LITERATURE. Make sure that all your business card, letterheads and brochures have your web page address and email. 9. KEEP THEM COMING BACK WITH A FREE USEFUL SERVICE. If your a realtor, put a free amortization calculator on your website, free reports, free email address and useful things that make them bookmark your site and keeps them coming back. If you sell used equipment or merchandise, add an Auction to your site. Be creative, there are a host of free CGI scripts on the internet, get one and install it. The largest resources I have seen are listed below. You will have to know how to install CGI scripts but if you can't do it ask your webmaster or Hosting Service to install it for you.
The CGI Resource Index http://www.cgi-resources.comSearch Script http://www.scriptsearch.com (5400 scripts) Hot Scripts http://www.hotscripts.com/10. START A RESELLER OR ASSOCIATE PROGRAM. Just about every business can use a sales force. One of the secrets to being successful on the net is to duplicate yourself and your efforts. These sites will show you how to do it.http://www.associateprograms.comhttp://atlnetwork.comhttp://associate-it.com 11. LOCAL BUSINESS DIRECTORIES. Do a search on the search engines for your local city, town and state. Many have local business directories that are free to place ads or links on. Write them a short email and description about your business. 12. START AN OPT-IN MAIL LIST OR NEWSLETTER. People love to belong and be accepted. You can start an eGroup (email group) for your business to keep your visitors, customers, suppliers up to date on just about any topic you desire. Learn how here. http://www.egroups.com13. BUY KEYWORDS FROM THE SEARCH ENGINES. Very few people know that you can buy "keywords and phrases" from all the top search engines. Buying keywords will insure excellent engine placement. Make a short list of your most important keywords and phrases. Contact the sales department at the major search engines and ask them what it would cost for each one of your keywords and phrase. The cost will depend on what words you are asking for and the number of times that they are searched for on that particular engine. They keep close track on every search that is placed with there service. If your in the right business you might be surprise at how inexpensive this can be, however if you are in the type of business that is very "big business" like cosmetics or web development, your budget probably won't allow for this type of cost. 14. KEEP A DATABASE OF VISITORS. Keep all your contacts that you obtain through your website for future use, you will want to use them later for such things as announcements, specials and sales. Always respond quickly to any inquires you get from your website. The internet is a "instant gratification" medium, meaning people don't like to wait. I would also suggest setting up an Auto-Responder for your website. 15. CREATE A "SIGNATURE" IN YOUR OUT GOING E-MAILS. Most e-mail programs such as Eudora, Microsoft and Netscape allow you to designate a "signature" to appear at the end of each message you send. Limit it to 6 to 8 lines: Company name, address, phone number, URL, e-mail address, and a description of your business offerings. 16. NEWS GROUPS. There are over 40,000 news group on the net on just about every topic you can imaging. Find some pertaining to your industry and partake in the discussions. Do not send Advertisements to these groups, let the Signature File At the bottom of your email do the work for you. Use a service like DejaNews http://www.dejanews.com or the news client in Microsoft Outlook or Netscape with the news service that your ISP subscribes to, and most of them do. 17. HAVE A MONTHLY CONTEST. People love getting something for free. Usually no matter what business your in, whether your selling products or a service you should be able to do this one. Having a contest brings a surprising amount of people to your site. If you sell baskets for example, give one basket away per month, or every other month. There are many places on the net to announce a contest.
18. TRACK YOUR VISITORS. I also highly suggest adding a Tracker to your website. Trackers will tell you where your visitors found your website, keywords they used, what country they're from, day of the week, time and a many other statistics that will allow you to tweak and change your website and really know what advertising is working for you. There are many Free Trackers available but the one I suggest is http://www.extreme-dm.com/19. ACCEPT CREDIT CARDS. If you are really serious about making money on-line, you must accept credit cards. There a couple of ways to do this, however. You can add a shopcart service like AmeriCart http://www.americart.com , I have used this service for some of my clients and they are very professional and the service works very well. This will save you from having to buy a Site Certificate to add security or SSL to your site, a site certificate runs about 300.00 dollars and your hosting service usually charges and estimated 20.00 per month for the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) The only draw back to a service like AmeriCart is that you will need to have an existing Merchant Account which you can set up through your local bank Another alternative is a service like Total Merchant Solutions (TMS) which will accept and verify credit cards over the net. This is a little more expensive but easiest way since there is no intervention required from you, except to fill the order. A service like this will automatically deposit your money directly into your account.
20. BANNERS. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site that other marketers may recommend, such as banner exchange programs, awards programs, Free For All Link Pages, etc. etc. etc. They in fact add very little value to your site or business, and even distract your visitors away from your products, when you've worked so hard to get them there. I just hate to go to sites that are filled with other peoples banners. If your going to do banners, do them right, buy space for your banner on other sites that will drive the kind of traffic to your site that you need, and keep other peoples banners off your site if you can. If you need banners try this on-line banner maker, it's free and it's fast. http://www.animationonline.com/I have certainly not even touched on all the ways to generate sales leads to your website. The business of E-Commerce is basically a numbers game. The more links and more search engines you are listed in, the better chance of your success. Advertising on the internet is just like any other business, YOU HAVE TO WORK IT in order to succeed. Success is a very relative term, success is not making a Million dollars on the internet, unless that is the goal you set. If you planned to make a hundred dollars and you've made a hundred and one, you have been successful. Set your goals and achieve them!
About the Author:Robert Boilard is a professional developer, marketing strategist and one of the principals' at i4Market, LLC. Since 1993 Robert has been producing successful website and marketing campaigns for companies from the 2 person office up to the Fortune 500's. Visit us today!
Specialty Wound Care, Tracheostomy Care, Urological Catheters, Urological Collection Devices, Vitamins / Oral Medications, Wheelchairs / Accessories, Women´s / Infant

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