Attracting Website Visitors

For many web site owners this consists of building the site, submitting to the search engines then waiting for that huge rush of visitors and hopefully the flow of orders that comes from this. The reality can be a disappointment and it's not difficult to imagine why when you consider that Google, for example, lists more than 8,000 million web pages. When the site receives few or no site visitors and no orders, the site owner concludes that either the site they have is no good or that the Internet is useless for their business.

But in fact the Internet is a good medium over which to conduct business and any website can grab their share of the action, but it doesn't come easily - it takes work. A website that only has a few pages with little interesting content that never changes is a dead website. If you expect anyone (including search engines) to take an interest in your website then you must provide plenty of content that is of interest and that changes regularly.

Playing the Numbers With few exceptions, all websites are intended to sell. Online stores obviously are, but even non-profit websites are trying to sell information or ideas. When it comes to selling there are many factors involved, including how good the product is that you're trying to sell. But there's a single factor upon which all others depend and that is the number of people who know about the product. All other factors - quality, price, presentation - count for nothing if no one has seen the product. In other words - it's a numbers game. If you have a shop in a street where 1000 people walk by per hour, then only a small percentage will even notice the shop - and of those only a small percentage will be tempted to enter the shop - and of those only a small percentage ... you get the idea. If you have a small shop up a side street then it's just not going to do as well as a big one on the main street - it's a numbers game. This is the principle that mass spammers rely on - even if only one in a million buys, sheer weight of numbers ensures sufficient sales. With a website the same general principle applies. To sell you need numbers first and foremost. Of course if site visitors arrive to find incomprehensible rubbish then you still won't sell but the numbers game is still one you must play.

How Many Pages Should a Website Have?

As many as you can fill with interesting content. If you're not a programmer and have to pay one to do this for you, then this can be expensive. However, if you have a content management system like Total Control or Total Control Cart there's no excuse for having a site with only a few pages since you can create as many as you need. Search engines list web pages, not web sites, therefore more pages means more chances of being listed under a variety of search terms and hence more opportunity of pulling in site visitors.

What Sort of Content?

If you're running an online store then it might seem obvious to display only your goods or services but this isn't likely to provide much interest except to those who are searching for, and wish to buy the specific goods you have on offer. It would be advantageous to attract visitors who hadn't planned to buy the specific goods you have on offer but do end up buying when they stumble across your site. The way to do this is to provide interesting and informative content, that isn't specifically designed to sell, as this will provide a gateway to the selling pages. For example, if you run an online photographic store you could consider pages that outline the way to get the best results from your camera or suggest the best types of cameras for specific purposes.

Using Outside Contributors

If you're not too keen on writing web page copy then you could invite a friend or local enthusiast to write articles and publish photos on your site. Most people are happy to be published on the web if you give them credit (or a link back to their website) and as long as the subject matter is appropriate you can include lots of articles. Total Control and Total Control Cart allow you to create additional page editors and if you're willing to give control of the copy of some of your site's pages then you can rely on them to regularly update those pages with fresh content on a regular basis.

Using RSS

RSS is a format that allows content to be shared across the web easily. Generally sharing is most useful to websites that have lots of content, particularly if that content is regularly updated. An RSS file (or Feed) is written in XML and holds a list of items, each of which contains a title, description and a link to a web page. Users who have Feed Readers can paste feeds into their readers and keep up to date with the latest from their favourite web sites by reading the headlines and descriptions, provided by the feed, then clicking through to the website for more information. As well as this, websites with feeds can distribute their content by offering other website owners headlines, descriptions and links as a taster to users to visit their sites for more detail. This benefits both website owners, who wish additional content, and those who wish additional site traffic.
The implications for attracting visitors to your website are obvious. You can distribute your content by submitting to RSS feed aggregators (RSS search engines) where the feeds will be picked up by users for their feed readers as well as webmasters who are looking for content feeds. Not only this, but the major search engines are beginning to take RSS feeds seriously and are developing RSS feed search engines as well as marking sites with RSS feeds in search results (making them stand out). A comparatively small number of sites are providing RSS feeds so for the present it's a seller's market.


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