This is a question that I’ve received on more than one occasion. Anyone who has a website should care about website optimization. If you have a website, odds are you’ve spent time and money to create it. So what is it doing for you? Too many people create a site and do nothing to drive traffic to their site, then, wonder why business hasn’t improved. In traditional terms, you can create the most beautiful advertisement, however, if you never place it where it can be seen, it’s useless. It’s the same for websites. That is where website optimization comes in. It’s the practice of driving traffic to your website. There are several ways to do this.
The first way to drive traffic to your site is to ensure that your site can be found. This is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. By including meta tags and descriptions as well as improving the content of your site, you can improve the organic search-ability of your site so that people can find you. This is a long-term investment that pays off in gradual increments. Over time, search engine optimization will help improve your search engine rank and make it easier for potential customers to find your site.
The second way to improve your website optimization is a traditional pay-per-click program. These are the ads that show up in the right hand column of a Google search. The nice thing about these ads, as the name says, you only pay for those searches that actually click through to your site. This program is intended to drive unknown prospects to your site.
A third method of website optimization is called e-marketing. This includes creating an e-newsletter campaign and/or blog to help educate your customers. It is a good way to ensure that you have a consistent presence with your existing customers and known prospects. It will remind them that you’re out there and in some cases, depending on the article, educate them about capabilities you have that they may not know about or have forgotten.
The final form of website optimization is inclusion of RSS feeds to your website to pull the latest news from a blog into your site. This can help to keep your site updated with little effort. This will also help your search engine optimization and gives users a reason to go back to your site more frequently as they’ll know that you have updated information.
Basically, website optimization is a means to get your site working for you. Years ago, when people created or changed their website, they would let everyone they knew know about it. We’ve gotten away from that practice. Website optimization takes the best of those practices and incorporates them into a program that will make your website work for you.