Guaranteed Traffic Generators!

By Chad Hall
Posted Monday, October 11, 2004

How do you promote a web site for a company that has an extremely limited buying group? Sure, most of the companies on the Internet today sell one small product or service, which is searched for by thousands, if not millions of people every day. But, if your company is like ours, you don't have a lot of people searching for your product. Or your competitor's product! Our company is in the high voltage capacitor business. There just aren't a lot of uses for our product in today's "smaller, faster, cheaper" world. What does all of this mean? It means that I have to work twice as hard as most web developers or promoters to get hits to our site. If your company is like our company, then you will want to follow the experience driven methods I have listed below.

1. Links, links, links.
I can't say enough about getting sites to link to yours. It is a very simple method, but it takes time and it WORKS! In my case, I have simply searched for companies that would require one of our parts. I then write to them and let them know that we would be interested in a link to their site. Nine out of ten times, they link to us without ever asking for a reciprocal link! Most search engines today take into account the number of other sites that link to your site. They assume that if other companies are linked to you, that your site must be good. Another approach is to search for links to your competitor's page. Go to the sites that come up, and ask them to link to your site as well. You will be amazed at the number of web sites that are simply devoted to linking to other pages! To search for links to a page, try using AltaVista or HotBot. As an example, type in the following: link:www.yahoo.com You will be amazed at the results! Of course, after you request links to pages, you will have to wait until the search engines have indexed again before they know that you are now linked to other sites. Search Engines index on a rate from every two weeks to ever six months.

2. Meta tags.
You MUST make sure that you have your Meta tags generated properly. This has been covered by Web Pro News an infinite amount of time, and it is just as important as registering your own domain name. Without Meta tags, most search engines will just pass over you. For a brief explanation on Search Engines and for a free Meta tag evaluation, visit Northern Webs at (http://www.northernwebs.com/set/setsimjr.html)

3. Text Only versions of your site.
If your page is available to other countries, as our is, it is a good idea to have a text only version of your site. Why? Because most of the people who are not located in the United States do not have the Internet connection speeds that we here in the US take for granted. Most of these people also have older computers with slower processors and low graphics capability. It has to be annoying for people in foreign countries to go to a site that has a product that they need, only to find out that they can't read the fancy Flash programming. I do not currently have this text only version, but I am working on it as we speak. So, to all of you in foreign countries, I have listened to your requests, and I am taking action!

4. New Killer Content.
Sure, you can have two thousand pages on your site. But, if someone has read them all, why would they come back? You have to continuously update your page and add new killer content. I suggest a weekly column or monthly bulletin. You just need something to keep the visitors interested in book marking your site for future viewing.

If you really want to gain visitors, then you will. When I started our site, we had 25 visitors a day. Now, we have had 100,000 NEW visitors in the past three months. We now have a 50% return visitor rate. In our industry, that is good. For our business, it is working phenomenally! The last bit of advice I can offer is to continually read the Web Pro News daily! It offers intelligent and cutting edge information, which will help your web site grow exponentially.

About the Author
Chad Hall
Custom Electronics, Inc.
Webmaster
Jr. Design Engineer
Manufacturing Engineer
CAD Systems Coordinator
URL: (http://www.customelec.com)
E-mail: webmaster@customelec.com
Phone: 1-877-RELY CEI
Fax: 607-432-3913