Business Website Tips To Generate Website Traffic

For your online storefront, having an easy-to-navigate site with simple purchasing ability is important, but is only effective if people are actually visiting your site. Bringing people to your site is crucial to your success. If you have no visitors, you have no customers. How do you turn visitors into customers and customers into repeat customers?

Get Your Own Domain Name

First, people have to be able to find you. To make this easy, you need to register your own domain name. Make it simple - something that is easy for customers to remember. Having your own domain name, such as www.YourStore.com, also lends an air of legitimacy to your online storefront, as opposed to having a long and involved URL through your Internet Service provider, like www.aol.com/members/johnQpublic/MyStore.html. Keep it short, sweet, and easily identifiable with your business.

Register With Search Engines

Once you have your own domain name, you need to register your site with search engines and possibly do some advertising to help people learn about you. You should at least register your site with the top six search engines - Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista and Webcrawler. Look for a button that says "Add URL" or "Suggest a site." There are also regional editions of Yahoo! and some industry-specific search engines which may help in driving visitors to your site.

If all this sounds too complicated or time-consuming, you may want to consider using a submission service. These services ask you to fill out one form, which they then send to several search engines and Web directories to register your site for you. Some services allow a limited number of free submissions and charge a fee for additional registrations. Leading submission services include Submit It!, !Register-It!, and PostMaster.

Offer Value-Added Features

"You can do all kinds of advertising, but unless you offer something else, they're not going to buy," says Marnie Ann Joyce, Web site producer with Manhattan-based Makeko. If you offer something other than your products - news, bulletin boards, your site can actually become a trusted resource for visitors.

Few site visitors buy on their first visit to a site. Offering value- added features and services will get people to return to your site. They'll think of you as a resource to turn to for news, announcements, trade show listings, or whatever other service you provide. If users trust your site and your resources, they're more likely to trust when it comes time to make a purchase.

Update Your Site Regularly

Updating your online store is important to ensure repeat purchases. If customers see the same information or graphics as the last time they visited, the chances are good that they will just leave the site, thinking that they've seen it all before and there's nothing new.

When it comes to updating your site, the same rules apply for an online storefront as for a physical store. Include new seasonal merchandise, as it becomes available, while still providing access to your "core" products. Run the occasional sale or limited-time promotion, to introduce new items. Advertise only items that you currently have available for sale, not something that is coming soon or that is out of stock. If you say something is for sale and then aren't able to deliver on the offer, your customers may lose trust in you. Trust is the bottom line when it comes to online purchases.