Attackr.com » Developer Portal for web designers, developers and programmers

Steps to Greater Website Profits

Utah web design — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:00:02 +0000

Giving Your Audience What it Wants

Too often web designers make a web site that only contain fluff. The problem is, visitors don’t come to your site to wast time, but usually have a distinct purpose. Don’t give them what they want, and they are gone!

So how do you appeal to these visitors? The easy answer, “Give them what they want.” The more important question you should ask is, “What do my visitors want?” To answer this question, you need to research three imperatives,

Who are your visitors?
What attracted them to your site originally?
What do they want when they come to your site?

Once you know who your visitors are, what attracted them and what they are interested in, it becomes very simple to attract and retain them.

So now your wondering how you find this out about your visitors. luckily there are plenty of tactics to help you do this. First tactic, just ask them. Find a way to speak to them and ask them, you’ll find that this is a very helpful tool. Another tactic is using analysis software like Google Analytics. This software is easy to set up, and can tell you mounds of valuable information about your visitors. These are very helpful ways to learn more about your visitors, and in turn, helps you to provide unique and very valuable content to them.

Attract a Larger Targeted Audience

By catering to your customers needs you’ll see an increase in traffic from past visitors returning to your site. But by extending your marketing reach you can compound the number of visitors your site will recieve. In this section we talk about some of the most important traffic building methods used by professionals each day.

If you want immediate traffic now, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the way to go. I offer a fair warning though, carelessness and lack of expertise can lead to a waste of your money. If you are new to PPC advertising we recommended to use a budget of $5 or less a day and use one of the most popular PPC systems: Google Adwords. One great benefit of using Google Adwords is that it connects directly to Google Analytics for extra detailed reporting. If done right, you’ll find PPC advertising as a very valuable tool in bringing in new sales every month.

If you like free relevant traffic, your going to love SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is about optimizing your web pages to become more search engine friendly, adding valuable and unique content and providing trusted links from within and outside of your website. The better ranked you can get your website in the search engines, the more free and relevant traffic you will receive.

Focus Your Website to Make Money

As mentioned earlier, you want to make it quick and easy for your visitors to get what they want. On the other side of the coin, you need to make it easy for your visitors to do what you want them to do. For example, why make them click through endless pages to sign up for a membership or newsletter? The easier you make it for your visitors to do what you want, the more they will do it.

Keep your website clean by only providing content that your customers want, and what you want your customers to do. Draw your visitors attention to a profitable action by using proper design such as color, contrast and varying fonts. Don’t forget to try new ways on different web pages to get your visitors attention.

The number of methods you can use to increase customer action seems enless. A few of the many worthy mentionables are branding, cross promotion, A/B testing and improving your call-to-action. Remember, the higher the rate of visitor to customer conversion the more revenue your website will receive.

Don’t Do it Alone

Too often we look to do our web design and marketing ourselves, and sometimes as a result, we lose more money than we save. Unless you’re dedicated and experienced in this area of specialties, you will find yourself beneath your competition when it comes to building an effective website.

Alexa Ranking: What Is It and Why Should You Care?

Aeriff — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:36:49 +0000

My fellow readers, to be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to my Alexa rank, but some recent posts around the interweb have prompted me to start thinking about it.

For those who don’t know, your website’s Alexa rank affects the amount of money that advertisers will pay to be shown on your site. The lower the numerical Alexa rank, the more money advertisers are prepared to pay. It’s not all that they will be looking for, but it’s an important factor regardless.

In short: a good Alexa ranking matters. So how do you go about ensuring a good ranking? Well, recently I’ve watched the Alexa ranking of this site get better and better over time so the waiting game is a crucial part of the rank improvement process.

So how do you go about improving your Alexa rank? Here’s a few simple tips to get you started:

Install the Alexa Toolbar
If you install the Alexa toolbar on your own web browser, then every time you view your own site, you register as a hit (and so does everyone else who vists your site with the toolbar installed). If you are an Internet Explorer user you can download it here. If Firefox is your browser of choice don’t feel excluded because you can install the SearchStatus Extension instead.

Encourage others to follow suit
Conformity isn’t such a bad thing in this case; so encourage your friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers to install the toolbar or the Firefox extension. Give them motivation by placing a link to it on your site. (Hint, hint)

Install Alexa widgets
It seems every site offers a widget for your site these days and Alexa is no exception. Read all about their widgets here. They look something like this:

Use Alexa redirects
Use Alexa Redirects on your website URL. For example: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.forgedeuphoria.com. Replace forgedeuphoria.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will only count each unique IP address once a day.

Write or Blog about Alexa
Webmasters and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has an effect on your Alexa ranking.

Give people good links
The blogosphere is generally a nice place, so it’s only simple logic that the more times you give people good quality links with good anchor text, the more times you will get the same high quality links in return and hopefully when clicked, will increase your Alexa ranking.

Try Alexa Autosurfs
Do they work? Everyone says maybe for brand new sites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there might be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using this option with caution.

So there are just a few options/tips to increase your Alexa ranking and start moving up in the interweb hierarchy.

Got any other Alexa tips? I’d love to hear them.

Attackr.com » Developer Portal for web designers, developers and programmers

Steps to Greater Website Profits

Related Posts:

Alexa Ranking: What Is It and Why Should You Care?

Related Posts: