As part of the process of giving folks a cost range for their website projects, they often mention that they want a newsletter. I wanted to review the different approaches that can be taken when trying to integrate a newsletter into a small business website.

There are many different ways to integrate a newsletter into your website and I’ll be covering some of the methods that my clients have used successfully with pros and cons of each approach. One of the things to understand about a newsletter, is that part of the process is creating the newsletter, while another part is sending it out. Another part is how to get folks to subscribe and how to manage that subscriber list. Each of these aspects needs to be taken into consideration when thinking about how best to implement a newsletter on your website.

Here are some of the ways my clients have implemented newsletters on their websites, in order of cost.

1. Using a subscription form and manually sending out emails.
Adding a standard HTML form on a website is easy and when someone fills out the HTML form, it simply sends the website owner an email. When the owner gets the email, they add the sender to their newsletter list, usually a distribution list in their mail application.
Pros: Very simple and low cost
Cons: Clients need to spend time manually managing their newsletter distribution lists. If  they send out too many emails, their accounts might be suspended. The formatting of the newsletters is done by clients’ mail applications.

2. Using a hosting company based “distribution list”.
Some web hosting companies (click here to see DreamHost’s) have a distribution list feature. This requires setting up a few pages on a website that incorporate subscription and un-subscription code. Newsletters are sent out via the hosting company’s control panel.
Pros: Fairly simple and low cost. Subscriptions are managed automatically.
Cons: Your hosting company has to offer this. There will be limits on the amount of messages you can send out in a given time unit. The formatting is controlled by the hosting company control panel.

3. Installing your own newsletter software
You can also install your own newsletter software on your website. This will require the creation of a database to store your subscribers. Some online stores have this capability and will integrate a newsletter feature with the purchase process.
Pros: Moderate cost. Subscriptions managed automatically. No monthly fees.
Cons: Need to find appropriate software and someone to install it. Learning curve required for clients understand how to write and send newsletters. May still need to limit number of emails sent and received to avoid email server shutdown.

4. Using a third party newsletter or email marketing solution.
A good example this is Constant Contact or My Emma. You sign up for an account, pick a plan, and then add a little snippet of code to your website. Many of them have nice templates you can customize to make your newsletters appear professional. The email list lives within the third party’s database, and their email servers are used to send out your messages.
Pros: Easy to set up, automatically subscription management, no worries about having your own email account shut down, templates available.
Cons: Monthly fee.

Summary

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got clients who use all four of these newsletter or email marketing strategies. From their feedback, the ones that seem to use #3 (using an online store integrated solution) and #4 (third party) are the ones that send out the most newsletters and get the most benefit. If you’re not too tech savvy, then I’d simply recommend using a third party newsletter or email marketing service. Although it requires a monthly fee, you don’t have to send out emails from your own email server, which is a big plus, meaning you are not limited in the number of emails you can send. They also manage subscriptions automatically, letting folks subscribe and unsubscribe directly, without your involvement. Happy newslettering!

My therapist client thought he had backlinks from three prominent therapy directories: Psychology Today, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), and the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT).

In general, when you can get your website listed in a directory that’s full of content that’s related to your targeted keywords, it’s a good thing. But when I used a backlink checker tool, I didn’t see any of these links coming in to his website. So I did some checking and here’s what I found:

1. Redirects – Psychology Today has a big directory of therapists and if you pay them some money they will list you too. They’ll give you your own page with your picture information about your practice and a link that’s entitled “Visit My Website”. When you click on it, you go to the therapist’s website. So it’s a link right? Sort of. If you hover your mouse over the link, you’ll actually see it looks like this:

http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/mywebsite-verify.php?profid=12345

It’s not really a link to your website. It’s a link to Psychology Today’s subdomain “therapists.psychologytoday.com” and it’s building a redirect command based on your profile id. While clicking on the link takes you to your website, this kind of link does not pass any authority or “link juice”. It does nothing in terms of your search engine rankings.

2. Only Accesible via a Form – The AAMFT actually uses a service called TherapistLocator.net – but when you try to search, you first have to click on an “I accept” link that then takes you to a form. In order to access the page, you have to fill out the form and click a button. Search engines can’t do this. They can only find their way to webpages by crawling around links. Therefore while a human might find your practice, a search engine will never find your page on TherapistLocator.net. The ABCT has the same setup – you must fill out a form to get to the therapist’s page, a search engine roadblock.

3. Whoops, There Is No Link – On the ABCT website I tried to location my client’s page, and found it, but whoops, there was no link to his website. So if you think you have a link to your website somewhere, just double check it to make sure.

4. NoFollow – Another type of search engine roadblock, are links that have the “nofollow” attribute attached to the anchor tag. You have to view the source code of the page (which is really easy, just click “view source” in your browser) and see if the link code has this attribute. This is an instruction for a search engine bot not to follow the link, therefore, you don’t get any link juice. I didn’t find this in any of the examples for this client, but I have seen them before on other directories for other clients.

So in summary, backlinks (links from other websites to your website) are really important to search engine ranking. They are like a vote for your website and pass some authority or “link juice”. But just because you think your website is listed in a directory, doesn’t mean that it’s helping your search engine ranking:

First make sure the link to your website is actually there.

Next, make sure you can get to your website’s link by clicking on other links, and not by filling out a form.

Once you get to your website’s link, make sure it’s a real link directly to your website URL and not a fancy redirect.

And if it’s a real link, make sure it doesn’t have a “nofollow” attribute attached.

If it passes these tests, it’s a really good link and will help your search engine ranking. If not, it might still help humans find your website, as many people do use these type of professional directories to search.

I adhere to Google’s Quality Guidelines for Webmasters. While it’s true that Google’s massive search engine algorithm is secret, they publish detailed guidelines for those of us who design websites to tell us what to do, and what not to do. Web designers who don’t follow these are creating websites that may be penalized or removed from Google’s index. Being removed from Google’s index could cause a small business, who relies on Google’s traffic, to go belly up. Violating these guidelines can have serious consequences.

One of the big quality guideline violations, is known as “doorway pages“. Here’s how Google defines doorway pages:

“Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.”

Here’s an example of a doorway page scheme I ran across recently while doing some search engine optimization for a client. For the sake of this blog article, let’s say my client makes widgets in Seattle. When I was investigating other websites that ranked well for “widgets Seattle” I noticed this one site, let’s call it “SeattleWidgets.com” (not it’s real domain name) that was ranked highly. When I looked at their backlinks, I noticed they had several links from websites that should have been competitors. But when I looked at these websites, they were all actually doorway pages that had links back to the main SeattleWidgets.com site.

How did they do this? They purchased domains that included the names of different neighborhoods around Seattle and added “widgets”. These doorway domains looked like this:

pioneersquarewidgets.com
lakeunionwidgets.com
belltownwidgets.com
southlakeunionwidgets.com

You get the idea. When you went to these doorway domains, they were nearly identical in appearance, all made from the identical template. The content was similar, except stuffed with keywords about widgets and the neighborhood. But when you clicked on the links, you got redirected to the main website SeattleWidgets.com.  They even tried to make it sound official, and had “A subsidiary of  Seattle Widgets” in the banner area. But the phone number and address was identical. All links led to the same “real” domain. Thus, these domains were doorway pages, and violated Google’s quality guidelines.

So what do you do if you’ve discovered that a competitor has created many of these doorway pages or multiple domains that all direct traffic back to their “real” website? Answer: Report them to Google. Follow this link to report spam in the Google index. It’s quick and easy, and helping Google to get rid of these junk websites is a good thing. You’ll be helping your own business and helping others. It’s all good.

What do you do if you have one of these doorway page scam? Stop it immediately. Remove the content and set up redirects to your one “real” domain and pray that you did this in time before Google caught you. And don’t do it again.

Recently my beloved website traffic tracking company, Web-Stat, announced a new feature: Geo-Targeting. This nifty feature enables your website to automatically detect a visitor’s location and do neat things like showing a particular banner ad or other location-specific content. It also  allows website owners to block all kinds of traffic to their websites by country, state, zipcode…and many other things. I thought, hmmm, why would someone want to block traffic? The answer: Spam Prevention!

There are two criteria that you should meet before you think about doing this. First, your business should have a defined region. There may be certain countries that you are 100% sure you don’t have clients in, or maybe don’t want clients in. Secondly, you get lots of spam from those same certain countries.

I meet both of these criteria. The vast majority of my clients are in North America. I’ve got one in Latin America, one in the UAE, had one in France…but in general, they’re in North America. And I routinely get lots of spam from two countries in particular: India and Russia. Spam costs me money because it takes me time to read and delete messages from these folks, and it’s also just plain annoying.

Take this example of an email I got yesterday afternoon from “Abubakar” with an email address of  “abu@cattechnologies.com”:

“Hello,I have visited your web site but i found some of drawbacks i.e:  1)your website has low Back links.  2)your keyword rankings are very low.  If you assist me to introduce our SEO services.Ihope you get more sales for your current website. I will be waiting for your reply…  Thanks & Regards,  Abu.”

First off, I hate spam. And I detest spam that actually tries to frighten me or actually insults me in order to get my business. I’ve worked very hard on my own website’s search engine rankings, and this particular spam just sent me over the top. When I looked in my Web-Stat account, sure enough, the person who filled out my contact form was from India. And then I remembered seeing the Web-Stat notice that they had a new Geo Targeting feature!

Now, I get spam from India and Russia all the time. In fact, if you look at my website statistics, 3% of my website traffic comes from India. And I get solicitations several times a week asking me to outsource my work to India, join in a back-linking scam, give them SEO work, etc. The only people who call me on the phone, asking me to outsource, are people from India. I confess I’ve been annoyed by this incessant badgering -  all from people in one particular country.

Russian folks seem to love to spam my blog. I don’t know why.  But they just do. Most of the time Akismet catches the spam, but some get through. They have all these funky Russian characters in the comments. Again, I have to read them, and delete them, wasting my time.

I did a bit of quick research and learned that Russia was the third worst spammer country behind the US and China. Looking at the Click Fraud Index by Click Forensics, Russia also scores quite high, with India being medium. TrendMicro.com has Russia at #2 and India at #7 for worst spamming countries. So my personal experiences aren’t that much out of line with what’s going on out there in spammers and fraud world.

So today, I’ve decided to take Web-Stat up on it’s offer and block my countries of choice: India and Russia. Sure I’ll give up some of my traffic, and also give up the possibility of having a Indian or Russian client, but I think it’ a good trade-off to make to avoid the wasted time and aggravation. I’ll let you know how it goes!

First, a quick lesson in Google Maps. In order to get your small business listed in Google Maps, which is an excellent thing to do, you have to register your business and enter things like an address, a phone number, and a website address, as well as other information about your business. It is a directory of local businesses, linked to regular Google searches. When someone does a search for something, like “website design seattle” in Google, you will often see a section at the top of the organic listings that shows a map and a list of businesses. These businesses are from Google Maps.

Now, I often look at “website design seattle” because those are my keywords. I’ve watched my own position in the Google Maps listing move around. For a time, I was ranked #1, and was happy.

One day, I was doing some research for a client, and discovered that a competing company had developed multiple websites with duplicate content  (this is called “doorway” pages). Someone then registered all these “fake” companies in Google Maps. I looked up the web design company to see who does this sort of thing because I was curious. I refer people to other website design companies, and if another company is trying to cheat the search engines, I don’t refer folks to them. I made a mental note of the company name.

Later, when I Googled “website design seattle”, as I am prone to do, the name of this very company came up, one once, but TWICE in the Google Local listings. Here’s what it looks like:

See the listings for A. and B. ? See how the phone number is identical? I’ve blurred out the company name and all but the last two digits of the phone to protect their privacy, but the domain and phone are  identical. In order to add a duplicate listing, they’ve created a subdomain, “website.theirdomain.com”, and added it as if it were another unique business to Google Maps. Also notice the generic names of the business “Seattle Website Design Firm” and “Seattle Website Design” – note, this is not the name of the company, but rather the keywords. It’s interesting to note that this seems to be a common practice as C. has “Website Design and Web Design Company” as the name of the business, when it’s clearly not. Is it the reason they’re ranked ahead of me? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Now, I like Google Maps, and often use it with my iPhone. I wanted to find out what the official rules were regarding how businesses got ranked. Admittedly I was much happier when I was number one, and wanted to know how to get back there, but I also wanted to know why and how other companies were cheating the system. Remember I used to be a Quality Director for Motorola – and I think it’s important to follow good rules that are set up to benefit everyone.

Here’s the official answer to “How does Google Maps rank business listings?“. Here’s what it says:

All Google search results are based primarily on relevance, and Google Maps listings are no different. Google Maps ranks business listings based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance (where indicated) and other factors. Sometimes our search technology decides that a business that’s farther away from your location is more likely to have what you’re looking for than a business that’s closer.

Google Maps and the Local Business Center are a free service, so there’s no way to request or pay for a better ranking. We also can’t provide additional details about our ranking algorithm. We do our best to keep the details of the algorithm confidential in order to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.

“…as fair as possible”…that sounds good. So Google wants it to be a fair system, that’s great.  Fairness is their product, after all – we use Google because it represents the most relevant search results, which money can’t buy and cheating can’t get.  In theory.

Next I went in search of help. I found the “Google Maps Help Group for Business Owners To Report Spam on Google Maps“. The instructions say that if you’ve found Google Maps Spam, to reply to the thread with the relevant information and they’ll address it. (UPDATE, I do NOT recommend using this forum because your reporting is public – and in the end, I got harassed. Use this new private form instead to report Google Map Spam)

So I did. I subscribed to the thread and posted a message about what I’d found. And I waited. And I started getting other folks complaints – around 3 a day were coming in – after a few days I unsubscribed. There are tons of folks complaining about Google Map Spam and honestly I have no idea whether these complaints are ever resolved. So far, mine hasn’t been, but I’ll keep Googling “website design seattle” and see if the duplicate listings for the same company disappear or not.  It will also be interesting to see if the business names get changed from keywords, to the actual business names. I believe in Google’s desire for fairness – let’s see what happens over time.

UPDATE: Read what happened next.

When new websites are “born”, it make take a while for them to start getting search engine traffic. And you can’t get search traffic from a search engine until they have visited your website and “crawled” over it’s pages.  It’s important for new website owners to know how to tell if and when search engines, like Google, the most important search engine, has come and crawled around their website. But how do you tell when Google has visited your website?

The best way to tell, is by using a neat feature of the Google search page. To use this, you can either go to Google.com, or use the Google search field in your browser’s toolbar. The important point here, is to use the Google search field, and not the browser’s regular URL (this is what website you’re on now) field.

In the Google search field, type in “site:” immediately followed by your domain name. No spaces.

So if I want to see the results for my own website, I would type in “site:AldebaranWebDesign.com” and hit the return button.

I’ll paste my own results below, so you can see what these look like:

A few things to highlight. First, you only see results if Google has crawled at least one page of your site.  Google won’t crawl your entire site on the first visit – it might take several visits, over a period of time to index all the pages in your website.

Take a look at the results. In the above example, the first line of each snippet, is the title of the page. This is set by the web designer by utilizing the “meta tag” for title. The second line is the page description. This is also set by the meta tag for description. If these look funny or don’t make sense – contact your designer to get these fixed.

See on the last line of each snippet, how it has a link to “Cached” ? The cached version is a snapshot of the page as Google captured it during it’s last crawl. If you click on “Cached” you can see this snapshot as well as a timestamp of when the crawl occured. Fascinating stuff!

How long will it take Google to find my website and pay it’s first visit?

Good question, and the answer is: it depends. When I develop new websites, I always inform Google (and MSN and Yahoo) of the new site’s existence. If you find evidence your new website hasn’t been crawled yet, you can always use this link to submit it to Google. Submitting more than once does nothing and may annoy Google, so don’t do it repeatedly. Another way to get Google to visit your new website, is to make sure other websites have links to your site. When Google crawls them, it will follow those links to your site. I’d say if you have a new website and have submitted it to Google, it should take around a month to get crawled for the first time.

How long will it take to get my whole website fully indexed by Google?

It may take several weeks after the first crawl to get fully indexed, assuming your website is fairly small, under 50 pages. The larger your website, the more time it takes to get fully indexed.

Why is getting indexed so important to getting traffic?

Because you need to be indexed by a search engine before they will send you any traffic, just like you need to have your business published in a phone directory before folks can look you up and find your business. Indexing is a page by page activity – and most likely your home page will be indexed first. But until a page is crawled and indexed by a search engine, that search engine won’t be able to show your page in the results of searches.

What if I have a blog or an online store – will they be indexed?

If you have a blog or an online store that’s written in PHP, yes, they will be indexed as well. I don’t work in other languages, so I don’t have personal proof, but I do believe that most kinds of dynamic website pages are crawl-able and index-able by Google. To verify this, simply check yourself. If you have 100 products in your store, or 100 blog articles, they all should eventually be indexed by Google. But it’s a good question to ask your web designer to prove this to you before you invest in a particular blog or online store or other database driven online application.

What about Yahoo and MSN?

You can use the same technique to see if Yahoo and MSN have visited and indexed your website. The only difference is that like Google, MSN shows you the crawl date via “Cached Page”, while Yahoo doesn’t. Just remember you’re typing “site:yourdomain.com” in the search field.

So if you have a brand new website, or an old one that isn’t bringing you much search engine traffic, take a look and make sure your website has been crawled and indexed by the major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. You can’t get free search traffic until you get crawled.

Now remember, I’m a web designer. And that what I’d be looking for was a link from a website that was about…oh, I dunno, website design. Remember that search engines evaluate links in context, meaning the content that surrounds the link to your site matters in how much this link will be counted towards getting your website ranked for your keywords. You want links from pages that have your keywords in them. This is link building 101. You want links from pages whose main topic matches your website’s keywords. Here’s the email I received:

Link Exchange Request for Discount-pet-superstore.com PR 1+

Dear Webmaster,

First of all let me introduce myself – I am,Rokshar Link Manager

I handle online marketing for my client http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com

To increase the link popularity of my client’s site , we are now looking for triangular Link swapping with some good quality sites. You are already aware that Triangular Link swapping is much more popular and beneficial than Reciprocal Link exchange . This way both the sites gets the benefited . I would request you to place my client’s link at your site.

Please add my links on minimum Page Rank 1+ (otherwise it will not acceptable by my client) and use the following code for linking to us

Here are details of my site :

Url : http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com
Title : Discount Pet SuperStore
Des : Buy PetSafe Wireless Dog Fence, Dog Doors, Dog Crates, PetSafe Electric Dog Fences, Pet Containment Fencing, and Discount Pet Supplies

Or you can simply use the following Linking code:
a href=”http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com” Discount Pet SuperStore /a Buy PetSafe Wireless Dog Fence, Dog Doors, Dog Crates, PetSafe Electric Dog Fences, Pet Containment Fencing, and Discount Pet Supplies

Your link will be added within 12 hours at
dogfence-shopping.com (PR3)
OR
horses-shiatsu.com Within 12 hours.

Please forward me your linking details along with confirmation where my link have been added by you .

Hoping an early and positive response from your side.

Have a nice day ahead

Bsest Regards
Rokshar
Rokshar.anjum@gmail.com

Let’s dissect this request:

1. Website Conflicts With My Values: First and foremost – I believe that electronic dog fences are completely inhumane.

2. It’s a form letter: Meaning to me that this person probably didn’t even visit my website, otherwise it would be “Dear Jill”. Call me crazy, but I just don’t respond to form letters. I think they’re spam and treat them as such.

3. Triangular Link Swapping Is “Black Hat”: This means that whenever you try something that tries to fool search engines, it’s bad news. This is just like reciprocal link swapping, which is better than nothing, but not good as one-way links. The best links are those that folks give you because your content is worthwhile, not because “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. Google is smarter than you may think.

4. No value to my website or my visitors. As previously mentioned, having a link to my website from a dog fence website or a shiatsu for horses website is of absolutely no value to me or the people who might be on my website. You should add links to your website because your customers will find the information useful. Other people will add links to you because they find your website information useful.

Bottom line: If you are going to hire a company to perform link building for your new website, find out HOW they plan to do this. If they are going to send out terribly written cookie cutter emails to random website owners – take your money elsewhere. Real quality link building is much more than hiring someone to send out spam on your behalf.

I often receive requests from people I don’t know asking me to exchange links. Exchange means that they’ll put a link on their website to me if I put a link on my website to them. Then we’d become one big happy link family. And the more links to your website, the better, right?

Well, it depends.

Let’s do a refresher on what makes links from other websites valuable. First, they should be coming from websites that have a good “pagerank” with Google. There are tools available to check out a website’s pagerank, like this one. Compare the website’s home page “page rank” to the page they’re saying they’ll put your link on. If the page rank is “n/a” or 0 (zero), look elsewhere for links.

The second thing to remember, is that the page they’re putting your link on should have content that’s relevant to your keywords. For example, if you’re a dog trainer, you should try to get on dog related websites – the links are evaluated in context with the content that surrounds them.

The third thing, is understand how unethical folks will promise you a link, but in reality attach a “nofollow” value attribute (HTML) that in essence, tells search engines not to follow the link, thereby rendering the link to you worthless. If the page has other links on it, view the source code and find the code that’s got the link, and look for a “nofollow” attribute. If you see it, it means this person is trading worthless links. (I’ve added them to the links below, so if you view the source code of the page, you can see what they look like)

So, with these three rules in mind, let’s look at an email I received recently asking me to exchange links. Here’s the email:

Hello,

I was looking at your site and it’s very interesting and well structured. I also have a website, please take a look at it:
http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com

I was thinking if you would like to make a link exchange, this will be a benefit for both of us, don’t you think so?

Here are my site details:
Title: Safeco Field Hotels
Description: Stadium Hotel Network offers great rates on over 50 hotels near Safeco Field.
URL: http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com

The reciprocal link of your site you can find at:
http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com/resources

If you accept my link exchange invitation please add my link on your page, and I will put your link to my site as soon as possible.

Kind regards,
Tanya

Now, let’s test Rule #1.

1. What’s the PR of the home page and the page the link is promised?

The home page has a PR of 3, which is fine. However the page that the link will be on has a PR of zero. Not good.

Let’s look at Rule #2.

2. Is the content relevant to my business? “Safeco Field Stadium Hotel Network”? Um, I’m a web designer, so no, this is completely irrelevant.

And finally, Rule #3.

3. Since there are no other links on this page, I can’t tell if there are “nofollow” tags

So in summary, this is not a good deal for me. In general, as a rule, I don’t add links to other people’s websites because they ask me to – rather I add them because I think they’ll be helpful to my clients and blog readers. Understand what I’m saying, that links should somehow add value to my web page, a source of additional information – not simply a link to someone else’s website that is not at all relevant, like the Safeco Field Stadium Hotel Network.

Now, why you ask, would someone send me this email. The answer is, because they’re engaging in a link building campaign, trying to get as many links to their website as possible. Apparently, they don’t care where the links come from, as I imagine not many folks who are looking for a hotel will also be interested in web design services.

If you’re going to send folks unsolicited emails asking for links, at least tell me WHY a link to your website will be of value to MY website visitors. Convince me. Don’t try to flatter me with a generic complement like “I was looking at your site and it’s very interesting and well structured”. Not good enough. Although I do love flattery, it won’t get you a link from me.

Another tip to getting links from others, is to post VALUE ADDED comments on other people’s blogs. If you join the conversation and have something that really is going to improve the quality of the conversation, go ahead and include a link to your website, or relevant article. I frequently do this, and since many blogs are monitored by humans, they let my links remain, because I’m careful not to look like a spammer, but rather someone who is participating on the conversation and ADDING VALUE.

Happy link building!

Here’s a link to the tool so you can try this out for yourself: Google Keyword Selection Tool.

The tool is designed to help people, primarily those who use Google AdWords Online Advertising, select the best keywords for their campaigns. Here’s an example screenshot (click on the thumbnail to see it full size):

It’s truly incredible data to behold. So if you’re wondering how many people search Google.com for specific keywords, give this free tool a try.

One of the cool things to check out, is clicking on the “Choose columns to display”. In the view above, I’ve chosen to show Volume Trends. No wonder I’ve been so busy lately – look at how searches for website design have gone up over the summer months. Very, very cool data. Maybe I’ll use it to plan my next vacation!

Many of my website clients, after watching their website traffic statistics, are dismayed to see many people coming to their website leaving after only visiting one page (this is called the “bounce rate“).

They also often see visitors who may look around at several pages and then decide to leave without purchasing anything.

They even see people who were very close to a purchase. Visitors who after adding items to a shopping cart and starting the check out process, left before completing the purchase ( this is called “shopping cart abandonment“). While all of these visitor activities are normal and expected, what’s often surprising to my client is how often they happen.

This begs the question: how much traffic does it take to make a sale, or have a prospective client fill out a contact form? This metric is known as “conversion rate“. It can be used to measure any desired behavior of your website visitors. If 100 people visit your site and 1 fills our your contact form, your conversion rate is 1% (1 contact form / 100 visitors). Since most new website owners have no experience with website statistics, I’ll share some of the data from my own website and from what I’ve seen on some of my client’s websites.

Conversion Rate:
How do you measure conversion rate? Some website traffic tracking tools have built in ways of tracking this for you. All that is needed is to label the appropriate target page. The website tracking software tracks how many total visitors you have and what percentage of them hit the target page. Each time they hit the target page, they are considered to have “converted”.

Different Examples of Target Pages for Conversion Tracking:

• Shopping Cart “Thanks” Pages (last page after sale is completed)
• Contact Forms
• Newsletter Subscription Pages

On my website, I have two target pages, my contact form and my online ecommerce demo store.

Let’s look at my conversion statistics for my contact page:

Google	1,244	45	3.6 %
Direct Access (no referrer)	287	17	5.9 %
Google-Intl	227	6	2.6 %
MyClients	29	3	10.3 %

This data indicates that visitors who come from Google in the US, convert at a rate of 3.6%, while visitors who come from the websites of my clients, convert at a higher rate of 10.3%. (This data was collected using the Web-Stat.com traffic tracking tool.)

This makes sense doesn’t it? That the people who are following a link from one of my clients’ websites are more likely to convert than a complete stranger who found me on Google?

Measuring Quality of Website Traffic

Conversion rate tells us something about the quality of the website traffic source. If you are paying for traffic by utilizing pay-per-click online advertising measure the quality of the traffic that you’re paying for is super duper important to determine your return on investment. It’s easy to label your paid traffic sources and categorize them in Web-Stat so that you see if one ad has a higher conversion rate than another. This is one of the really neat things about the web and online advertising.

Remember, The “Real” Conversion Rate May Be Lower

If your conversion target is a contact form, then your “real” conversion rate will be lower than the conversion rate measured by the contact form conversion rate. Why? Because not everyone who contacts you will be converted into a customer.

Tiny Numbers

Now you’re thinking, hey, these conversion rates are getting to be pretty small numbers. Let’s say out of the people who contact you, 25% are converted to clients/customers. This means your real conversion rate is 25% of 3.6%, which is 0.9%. This means, to get a new customer, you need to have 100 people visit your website from Google, for example. Think about that. If your contact form to client conversion rate is 1 in 10, then you will need 277 visitors to get 1 client. Tiny numbers.

Setting Expectations for Conversion Rates

So don’t expect to have every visitor turn into a customer – it’s just not the way the web works. It’s a percentage game, and you will need a certain level of good quality traffic to turn enough of those visitors into clients.

I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

Ok, so I’m biased because I’m an engineer. Not just someone who calls themselves an engineer, but a real one with an engineering degree. I’ve created concepts, designs, prototypes, tests, and finally production quality products. Engineers might not be the most aesthetically driven sort of folks, but they sure do care about how things work. And websites are not just static pictures that you look at like a painting. They are dynamic. They are part of a living, breathing organic network called the Internet.

Now I agree that websites should be pleasing to look at, after all it’s a visual medium for the most part. They should also be easy for people to use. But the purpose of the internet is the sharing of information.

I typically design websites for small business owners. Not artists, musicians, entertainers or media companies. Small business owners are not in the entertainment industry. Their websites have one main purpose: to get more paying customers. They do this by communicating information about their products and services in a compelling and clear manner.

Artists create art to convey messages, stir emotions and inspire us. They are experts at creating beautiful things. But, they are not driven to create things that DO something. Websites must do many tasks. They need to capture your attention, lead you to perform certain behaviors (like checkout out a shopping cart or filling out a contact form). They must run and get content from a database and serve it to your visitors at lightening fast speeds. They must process credit cards securely. They allow you to create virtual communities by utilizing blogs or forums. They are very, very busy, and anything but static.

And they must be designed in such a way that other people can find them. Do you want your website to be a piece of art that hangs in a museum that no one knows the address of? Or do you want your website to be available to the entire world? Focusing exclusively on what your website looks like, and constructing it entirely of images or Flash, makes your website appear to search engines like a blank page.

Remember what “HTML” stands for? Hyper TEXT Markup Language. TEXT, TEXT, TEXT…it’s about written words. This is how search engines “see” the content on your website. They can’t “see” images, they can’t “see” Flash movies…but boy can they read text!

See how many times this is mentioned on the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Note they said text links, not images.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

Again…Google is telling you to use text, not images.

If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

And again…the more plain, regular, standard text, the better.

Still not convinced? Read this article from Google on “Working with Flash, images and other non-text files“. Here’s the very first few sentences (the bold is added by me):

In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.

Why then, given this clearly stated rule, do some web designers still create websites who have literally no content in text? Why do they make websites that are 100% flash, like the one my friend asked me to review?

Perhaps they simply don’t understand how the internet works and have never cared to learn. They are artists at heart and like to make eye candy. Or maybe they know and simply don’t care about whether or not their website customers EVER get any traffic.

Either way, as I’m sure you can tell by now, this annoys me to no end. How someone can call themselves a web designer and take people’s money and then give a 100% flash website that is completely invisible to search engines, not to mention people with visual impairments who rely on text readers, is simply beyond me.

So before you hire your website designer, figure out whether they’re more like an artist, or like an engineer. Do they focus on appearance to the exclusion of functionality? Are they knowledgeable about even the most basic search engine principles? Ask them, and look at the sites in their portfolio. Is there more to it that just shallow surface flashiness? Do their websites WORK for their clients?

Use this handy tool to check out their portfolio – it will show you how a website looks to a Search Engine

1. Enter the exact website address of the page you want to view. (eg. www.iwebtool.com)
2. Enter keywords you want to search for.
3. Click the “Show Me Search Engine Spider View” button.
The results will be displayed the the box below.

Powered by iWEBTOOL

Look at what’s in the window above. (If it’s not working, you may have to come back later and try it, the iwebtool.com site that provides this tool is very busy!) What you see is exactly how the page looks to search engine spiders as they crawl over your website. If your website has no or little visible text in this box, then you need to add content that is text…simple as that.

ADDENDUM: To Folks With Flash Sites Who Are Paying For Clicks

For some reason, I’ve been recently contacted by several folks who have 100% Flash websites who are looking for Google AdWords (Pay-Per-Click) consulting. I sent them this article in the hopes that they will understand that while I’m more than happy to help them with AdWords, I also feel that ethically I should tell them about how poorly their websites are performing in Search Engines.

There’s absolutely no reason that people should have to pay for all of their website traffic – search engines like Google are continually trying to find websites that are relevant to what people are searching for. Why have a website that’s designed to be invisible to Google and then turn around and pay Google for traffic? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

So if you have a website that’s Flash, and you’re thinking about Google AdWords or another Pay-Per-Click service, please take a moment to learn/read about Search Engine Optimization – I think it will be well worth your time and possibly enable you to ween yourself off of Pay-Per-Click and attract some free traffic that your competition, who doesn’t have a Flash website, has been getting.

Like blogs, forums are a way for people to attempt to get backlinks to their own websites. This is typically done by leaving comments that contain links to their website URL’s. If you’re honestly helping others and truthfully representing yourself, there is nothing wrong with having a link to your website, say, in your signature, or possibly to a relevant article you’ve written. But when you simply fake who you are, put in a useless comment in the hope to get a backlink to your website, you are considered a spammer.

This morning, my partner’s forum received a posting that said this:

Hi my name is collins and I look forward to learning about dogs from all of you. My older dog attacks my young puppy. Is there a way to train an old dog to like the new puppy?

Sounds like someone asking for help doesn’t it?

Except that the person added a link to a website in the signature. Where did the link go?

Take a guess.

A dog trainer! On the dog trainer’s home page, it had this statement. Brace yourself, it’s not modest:

Although she does not claim the ability to “read your dog’s mind”, her knowledge of canine behavior is so vast and her experience is so extensive, that when you describe your pet’s problem, she can not only tell you how to solve the problem, but why the problem exists.

Does the trainer have no idea how to solve dog issues like the one she posted, and she’s misrepresenting herself on her website? Or is she just looking for ways to get backlinks to her website by pretending to be a person looking for help. My guess is that it’s the latter, which is why I wrote this post.

If you want to get backlinks by posting in people’s forums, don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. If you are knowledgeable about the topic and can offer good advice to others, then simply do that. If you are indeed helpful, the forum owner will probably let you post your link, because you aren’t a spammer.

In this case, the forum owner looked at the posting and the link and quickly determined that it was another dog trainer trying to get backlinks to her website by pretending to be someone looking for help.

Now, what the other dog trainer SHOULD have done was to RESPOND to another person’s post who is looking for help. In this way, the other dog trainer was ADDING VALUE to the forum, not just simply trying to exploit it.

So a word to the wise: there’s nothing wrong with looking for forums where discussions are going on that are relevant to your business. Feel free to post and join the discussion. But don’t be a spammer and try to get undeserved backlinks. Be honest, be yourself…contribute!

This video tutorial takes you through the basics looking at your website statistics using Web-Stat, my favorite website traffic tracking service. If you want to sign up for Web-Stat, click here, they have a 30 day free trial. Enjoy the video!

Why is Bounce Rate Important?

Because bounce rate can tell you something about the quality of the particular webpage or particular traffic source. Let’s look at some example from my own website traffic statistics:

Bounce Rate For Different Pages On My Website.

You can see that my home page has a bounce rate of 42.3% while my Citysearch click fraud article has a bounce rate of 50.7%. (I’ve just changed the look of my home page, so we’ll see if this rate changes for the month of Feb). Blog articles often have higher bounce rates than “regular” website pages. Look at the different bounce rates for your webpages and investigate what the differences are between pages with low bounce rates and pages with high bounce rates.

Bounce Rates For Referral Sources.

You should also look at the bounce rate for the different traffic referral sources, especially if you are paying for this traffic. Notice that for my website, Google US has a bounce rate of 52.9%, while traffic from websites of my clients has a bounce rate of 34.7%. This makes sense, doesn’t it? If you are using pay-per-click advertising, be sure you’re watching the bounce rate of traffic from your ads, because a higher bounce rate means either your ad isn’t attracting the right buyers, or your ad’s landing page isn’t good enough to capture them.

What Should Your Bounce Rate Targets Be?
Obviously, the lower your bounce rate is, the better. Looking at the web traffic tracking statistics of my clients, the lowest bounce rate for a home page is around 22%. Remember, other things can affect your bounce rate – such as whether folks are searching specifically for your business name (ie: “Ahimsa Dog Training”) or generic keywords (“dog training seattle”). If people are looking for your specific business, due to your advertising efforts, your home page bounce rate will be lower.

I found an article that reported different bounce rates for different types of websites. The following is a quote from their blog:

“Retail sites driving well targeted traffic 20-40% bounce. (One vendor told us anything above 33% should be a flag)

Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as add to cart) I’ve seen bounce at a much higher rate, anywhere from 70-90%.

Content websites with high search visibility (often for irrelevant terms) can bounce at 40-60%.

Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups etc) have much lower bounce rates in our experience 10-30%.

Service sites (self service or FAQ sites) again usually lower 10-30%.

Lead generation (services for sale) 30-50%

Bounce rates on a blog is something I think is misleading. By their very nature a blog is a long list of posts and articles. I think bounce could quite easily be 80-100% on blogs because people tend to be reading one article or post at a time. However that doesn’t mean that people aren’t finding value which is why i think it’s misleading.”

The above guidelines are based in this one company’s experience, so your bounce rate may differ, but I think it’s a fair guideline to use.

Want to learn more? Here are more resources on Social Media:

ProBlogger’s Social Media Category

Five Reasons Twitter is an Essential Social Media Tool

I often encourage my small business clients to add WordPress blogs to their websites. WordPress blogs are a wonderful way to add relevant content that attracts visitors. Before visitors can find your WordPress blog article though, the search engines, like Google, need to crawl over your blog article and index it. How long does it take for search engines to become aware of a blog article, crawl it and index it? Read on…

I wrote an article last night on “Dynamic Ad Titles“. The article was posted at around 8:00 PM last night as you can see from the timestamp below:

The next morning, I did a search on Google for the keywords I had targeted in the article: “dynamic ad title”. Here’s what I found:

My article was listed fourth, out of 1,520,000 articles (wow!) and was crawled 13 hours earlier.

This means Google crawled my blog article around 10pm the previous evening. So if I posted the article at 8:00pm, this means that Google crawled and indexed my article 2 hours after I posted it!

I should also note, that searches in Yahoo and MSN did not yield evidence that either of them had indexed my article. No wonder Google is the #1 search engine.

If you’d like to read more about adding a blog to your website, visit my blog page. Blogs are a wonderful way to help attract traffic to your website as long as the articles are written on ONE topic and the blog’s title has been optimized for search engines. Keep blogging!

1. Starter Edition vs Standard Edition: I recommend clients start with the Google AdWords Standard Edition, versus the very simplified Starter Edition. You get much more control over your campaign and upgrading is free.
2. Remember your Goal: Customers, not just Clicks: Clicks cost you money, and if they aren’t converted into customers, there is no return on what you paid Google AdWords for that click. You are not just trying to accumulate clicks, you are trying to develop a campaign that attracts customers who are looking for exactly what you are selling.
3. Track Your Traffic: Set up an independent website traffic tracking tool that has the capability of identifying and segregating pay-per-click traffic. I can’t emphasize this enough. It will be impossible to calculate your return on investment (ROI) of your Google AdWords campaign if you don’t do this. I recommend Web-Stat to all my website clients, and it’s easy and simple to install. Don’t start a Google AdWords campaign without it! (Google AdWords also has a very impressive traffic tracking system called Google Analytics – it’s pretty complicated. But whatever you select, you simply must track your traffic if you’re paying for it!
4. Budget, CPC Bid, Impressions, Position. Learn about this using Google AdWords Help Center. Understand how these parameters do, and don’t interact with each other: Your CPC (cost per click) bid will change your position in the Sponsored Links list, but it will not affect the number of impressions (the times your ad is shown). Your budget will affect the number of impressions, but will not affect your position. You need both impressions and position to get clicks.
5. Learn about CTR. CTR stands for Click Through Rate, the ratio of number of clicks to number of impressions multiplied by 100 to get a percentage – and it’s generally small, like 1% to 3%. This means you may need 100 or more impressions to get a single click. The higher your CTR, the better, but again, you’ll need to convert these clicks to customers, so CTR isn’t the ultimate measure of Google AdWords campaign success.
6. Start With Very Few Keywords: Google AdWords is very sophisticated and has many built-in analysis tools. Start of with just one or two targeted keyword phrases, until you learn how the Google AdWords system works.
7. Match Ad Title and Content to Keywords or Services Offered. Go ahead and put your keywords into Google and see what comes up in the Sponsored Links. Notice how much there is to look at. How will your small ad capture the attention of the person who entered the keywords, and how will it ONLY capture their click if YOU are trying to sell what THEY are looking for?
8. Keyword Matching Strategy: Learn the difference between “broad match”, “exact match”, “phrase match”, and “negative match”. (Go here to watch a Google tutorial on keyword matching or here to read definitions of matching) Use these to filter exactly when you do, and don’t want your ad shown. (if you sell shoes, but not red shoes, you don’t want pay for “red shoe” clicks). Note partner sites use “broad matching”.
9. Estimate Search Traffic: Use this feature to determine how much to bid, to get good rankings. Target #1-#3, versus #4-#6, if you can afford it.
10. Where or When Are Your Customers? If your goal is to attract customers who are in a certain region, consider the differences between an ad that targets a city or a region. You can also specify the time of day your ads show.
11. Search Network vs Content Network. Google’s search network includes search engines like AOL, Ask.com and Earthlink. Google’s content network includes NYTimes.com, About, HGTV, etc. You can select whether you want your ad to appear only as a result of searches (on the search network) or on websites with content that’s relevant to your ad (content network) or both. They also offer “site-targeted ads” where you specify which websites you want your ad to appear on. If you’re starting out, I recommend sticking to the search network.
12. Pay Attention To Your Quality Score: I read a great article recently on Google AdWords Quality Score and why it’s important to pay attention to it and to work on improving it. AdWords isn’t simply a bidding war. You’ll get higher ad placement for less cost if your quality score is higher. Why? Because Google AdWords wants to serve ads that are relevent, just like Google the search engine does. How do you check your quality score? First, read this page from Google on Quality Score. Then go into your Ad Group, click on the Keyword tab, and hover your mouse over the magnifying glass icon. This will tell you your Quality Score for those keywords (in that particular campaign). To see all the Quality Scores for the Ad Group, click on “Customize Columns” and then select “Quality Score”…and presto, you can see the Quality Score for all your keywords at one time. The Quality Score categories are “poor” , “ok” and “great”.
13. Landing Pages: Google AdWords checks your landing pages, the pages that you send the click traffic to, to see how relevant it is to your ad. The more relevent the landing page, the higher your quality score and lower your bid. From a customer standpoint, it’s also better to have people land on the page that shows them what they were searching form versus your home page. If you have many products and pages, send them right to the page or category they searched for. The fewer clicks they have to make, the more likely they are to purchase.

I’ve had not-so-good experiences with other pay-per-click companies, but I think Google AdWords is excellent because they truly want you to succeed and give you many, many tools and tutorials to help you. You don’t commit to any long term contracts, and completely control your ads – you can start and stop them whenever you want to. If you’re interested in Google AdWords and would like some help getting started, please visit my page on Google AdWords Campaign Management and Consulting.

I’ve worked hard on my own website’s search engine optimization or SEO, as it’s known in the field. I’ve continually monitored my traffic, changed my page content, added pages, deleted pages, added a blog, just to name a few. All of these were designed to lure traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. I set out determined not to have to pay for my traffic, so I didn’t elect to run a pay-per-click campaign. All my traffic is FREE! But it takes time, patience and persistence to achieve these results.

What does it look like when you continually work on Search Engine Optimization? Here’s my very own traffic trend chart:

This chart represents 18 months of continuous search engine optimization effort. Now, I wasn’t working on my website every day, but rather search engine optimization works best if implemented in cycles, which is one of the reasons why it takes such a long time to dramatically change your website’s traffic using this method, especially if the competition is stiff (like it is for my field).

You do research, and decide what to change. Then you change it, noting the day you made the change. You wait for Google to recrawl your page, which may take days, or weeks or longer, depending on how frequently you change your page (the more you update, the sooner search engines will come to visit). Then you analyze the results, and do it all over again.

I wanted to share this data to help set the expectations of new website clients, who sometimes expect great rankings and huge website traffic right away. I also wanted to help set expectations of folks who already have a website, and have asked me to perform search engine optimization to improve their website traffic.

If you’d like to have me do an SEO audit of your website, please contact me. I can usually complete audits in around an hour, and provide you with a report containing recommendations.

So what should a new website owner do next?

Once your website is designed, your next step is to think about how you’re going to get real people, out there in internet-land, to visit your website. Just because it was built, there’s no guarantee they will come. Think of it…as of February 2007, there were over 108 million websites. How do people find your website among the millions?

Here are a few of the major ways people find websites:

1. By putting keywords into a Search Engine and clicking on the organic or natural (free) results.

2. By putting keywords into a Search Engine and clicking on the paid or sponsored links (pay-per-click advertising like Google AdWords. I offer Google AdWords Campaign Management for my clients…click here to read more .)

3. By visiting a directory (like YellowBook.com, local.yahoo.com, etc). (Read my article on how to get into the directories for free)

4. By following a link from someone else’s web page (like from my portfolio)

5. By clicking on an online advertisement, such as a banner ad.

6. By clicking on a pay-per-click link that shows up on a website portal that you happen to be on (like MySpace or Yahoo Mail).

7. By clicking on a link embedded in an email sent by you (via a newsletter perhaps)

8. By finding you in the media (TV, Radio, Newspaper, Magazines, etc)

Sound complicated? That’s because it is. Getting folks to visit websites is a huge industry. But it is important that all new website owners understand how each of these channels works, and which might best suit their small business.

Since I get most of my own website traffic from search engines, I’ll talk about about getting traffic via organic searches and pay-per-click advertising campaigns first.

Let’s take a quick tour of the Google Search Engine page:

You can clearly see the two regions, the natural organic results, and the sponsored links (pay-per-click).

Natural Organic Results. When you click on the organic results, no one gets charged anything. The super-secret ultra-smart Google algorithm decides that these 10 pages are the best match for what you’re looking for. The one that Google thinks is the most relevant will be first. The algorithm decides this, you can’t pay Google to put you there.

Sponsored Links. You can pay Google or the other search engines to link to you in the “sponsored results” section. If a user clicks on a sponsored result, the website owner who placed that ad will get charged for one “click.” Maybe they’re charged $1, maybe $10, it all depends on the market. Whoever bids the most per click winds up at the top of the sponsored list (Google AdWords has a more complicated algorithm that determines who’s on top). You can set a daily limit on how much you want to spend.

Which is better, being #1 in the Organic Results or being #1 in Sponsored Links?

There was an amazing study done in 2005 by two search engine marketing firms and an eye-tracking firm that tried to answer this very question. They tracked where people’s eyes went when they looked at search results in Google.

Here’s what they discovered…

For visual folks, here’s a color coded map of where subjects looked:

And for numbers-oriented folks, here’s a table with the same data:

They discovered that the top sponsored links were viewed by 50% of the people, while the top organic results were viewed by 100% of the people. This means that a #6 or #7 organic result was equivalent to a #1 paid sponsored link, and vice versa. Think about this and remember it. It’s incredible information that isn’t widely known to small business owners who are looking to ways to get more traffic to their websites. (Go here to read the original study findings, dubbed “Google’s Golden Triangle”.)

So why would anyone pay for a click when they can get them for free? … Great question!

It’s not free at first. Getting good organic search engine rankings is not free – it’s more of an investment that pays dividends later. It takes many many many hours of search engine optimization effort, time and lots of patience. And it often takes maintenance, to keep your website high in the rankings once you’ve gotten there, because other website owners may be doing the same thing, if they’re smart.

It’s not fast. Good organic search engine rankings don’t happen overnight. They’re the result of working hard to get other quality websites to link to yours (creating inlinks), constantly working on the structure and content of every page, using all kinds of online analysis tools to figure out how the websites that are ranked ahead of you got there, and then waiting for the search engines to visit again….observe the new ranking results…and do it all over again and again. If you start a Google AdWords Campaign today, you’ll start getting traffic immediately.

So what should a new website owner do to get traffic?

1. Work on getting high quality, relevant inlinks to your website. Get links to your website from the websites of friends, relatives, or business associates. Get listed in quality directories. Work on this constantly, a little bit at a time. There are many good directories that will list your website for free, others you may have to pay a fee for. If you have a physical address, make sure you get into search engine local directories like Google Local, Yahoo Local, MSN Local. Get into DMOZ. If you’re in Seattle, look for “Seattle directories”. Get as many as you can…dozens, hundreds!

Avoid “link farms”, those places that promise you a bizillion inlinks overnight. And try to avoid reciprocal links, where you put a link to your website in exchange for another website linking to yours. If it’s a business you are familiar with, that’s fine, but if it’s some strange website that has nothing to do with your business, be wary. You can get penalized for linking to what Google considers “bad neighborhoods”.

Go after directories and websites that have good pagerank. The higher the pagerank, the more value the search engines will place on the link to your page. Go here to check the pagerank of any website. All new websites start with a pagerank of 0 and slowly work their way up to 2 or 3 as they get good quality inlinks and age.

Monitor your inlinks. Here are a few tools you can use: BackLinkChecker, SmartPageRank, Yahoo Site Explorer. Notice several things: the “Anchor Text” (should match your keywords), PR (page rank), OBL (how many other outbound links are on the page in addition to yours, more is worse for you), Flag – if anyone has linked to you using “NoFollow” – this is an unethical site. NoFollow means they’ve added code to tell the search engines NOT to follow the link – therefore, it’s not helping you at all. And check the “www” and without “www” version of your site, you need to be consistent to concentrate the links, don’t mix them, pick one and stick to it.

2. Look into pay-per-click advertising. Be sure to read my article on click fraud. Google provides an excellent resource for learning about pay-per-click via Google Ad Words.� Because new websites are often penalized by Google and Yahoo, pay-per-click may be the only way of generating adequate traffic for new websites. My own website was in the “Google Sandbox” for nearly 8 months. That’s 8 months of visitors that I could count on one hand each day. I was fine waiting, but many small business owners can’t afford the delay.

3. Look into hiring someone to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Remember SEO will not bring you instant traffic, but may take many months or longer to see a return on this investment. However once you’ve achieve good organic rankings, you get traffic without paying anyone for clicks. I used SEO on my own website to get great rankings for “website design seattle”. (Put these words into Google and see where my website is at – don’t hire a website designer for SEO until you check their own website’s rankings!). Go here to read about my SEO services.

4. Track your website traffic and LOOK at the data. You should be studying your website traffic in order to see where people are coming from, what keywords they’re using, and what they do once they enter your home page. I recommend all my clients let me install a traffic tracking tool like Web-Stat on their websites, especially if they’re undertaking an organic search engine optimization campaign or a pay-per-click advertising campaign.

Whew! Getting visitors to your new website is complicated and you have many different options to choose from…feel free to contact me about anything I’ve written about here – or even if I’ve left something out that you want me to mention or even research.