In the common vernacular it’s called “driving eyeballs to your site”. There are a few ways to do this.
You could tell all of your friends and family about your site, and cajole or bribe them to tell everyone they know to visit your site. Don’t under-estimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing. But even if you have a large family or a larger circle of friends including, Facebook, Snapchat, or whatever is the current rage in cyber-socialism, you probably won’t drive enough people to your site, especially if you hunger for a global reach.
Another common strategy is traditional advertising. As you travel our highways and byways, count the number of billboards that includes a web address. Don’t ignore legacy marketing. Include an email and web address on your business cards, letterhead, message footers, and the bumpers of your car.
You know and I know the reason you clicked on this article is to pervue what wisdom I will spew about the sacred mantra of online marketing; SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. Say you are in the business of selling firetrucks. A potential buyer is seeking sellers of firetrucks. So our PB enters into a search engine the word firetucks and the search engine delivers a nearly limitless number of pages listing web sites mentioning firetrucks. The search engine can do this by utilizing a web crawler that scours web sites and indexes meaningful words and phrases.
The web crawler finds your site by either following a link on a site it is currently crawling through or you can tell the search engine to crawl your site. If you want to be noticed by search engines get as many web sites as possible to link to your site; Yelp. Linkedin, Facebook, clubs, NGOs, WordPress articles, firetruck association press releases…
Having your site included in that limitless list of URLs is not Gudenov. You want to be on the first page, or better yet, RIGHT ON TOP! You can pay through the nose for that premium placement or you can make your website the most relevant. Part of the secret to relevancy is a bit something like a self-fullfilling phrophecy. If all the people searching for firetrucks pick your site from that limitless list, and stay on your site for a while, your site is the most relevant. Some (most) “unscrupulous” SE Optimizers have an army of users or bots that will search to your site just before submitting their bill for services.
Search engines also quantify the relevance of the search word(s) against your site. Make sure the word firetruck appears often and in many different contexts on your site, as in titles, or in texts, like manager of firetruck sales, firetruck engineering, the history of firetrucks, or recent firetruck design considerations. You might want to differentiate firetruck surfers from actual buyers by prominately promoting firetrucks for sale. It doesn’t hurt to put your keyword in HTML/CSS constructs such as:
.firetruck-articlecol p
{
margin-bottom:4px;
margin-top:8px;
}
But beware of these old tricks and gimmicks. Way back when, a SEO optimizer would repeat the word firetruck in the background with the font in the same background color so humans could’nt see it. Today’s search engines know better. The search word has to have context with your site.
Google in particular gives bonus relevancy points for sites that are mobile friendly. It is beyond the scope of this article to describe how to be mobile friendly except to say that your site should contruct HTML differently for mobile-sized screens. Some SEs penalize FRAME constructs.
Google offers a free service called Google Analytics. You register for an account number and then place a small piece of javascript code in your site where you want to analyze traffic patterns. GA will give you IP addresses, City/State/Country of origin, date, time of day, and the length of time users spent at these places. For a premium GA will provide even more detail.
Do not start buying adwords until you have done your best to be relevant naturally. There is no majic in SEO. You cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.