Online Marketing

Building Web Traffic

The biggest pitfall one can have when getting a website designed is to subscribe to the „If you build it, they will come“ theory. At Huenig Webdesign, we have devoted our time to do what we do best, designing quality websites and building quality web applications. We’re the website builders. If you had a building built for business and then complained to your builder that nobody ever came to your business, they would probably chuckle and tell you „tough luck“! Construction companies generally don’t promote and advertise businesses that they do construction for.

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The best advice we could ever give our clients to build traffic is to have a marketing budget in association with building your website. To fail to plan is to plan to fail when it comes to marketing your website on the Internet. But there are so many ways, many of them cost ineffective, to spend your money promoting a site that it is very confusing to a novice.

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To this end, we offer the following advice garnered from years of experience building websites:

Hire An Expert
(Highly Recommended!)

There is no such thing as a web designer who is also an „expert“ at search engine optimization. There are simply not enough hours in the day to do both. A good search engine optimization expert spends 100% of his time analyzing, submitting, tweaking, and researching. We at Huenig Webdesign know a lot about the search engines, and we can offer good advice. However, the SEO experts are exactly that… experts. The services of a good SEO expert do not come cheap. Why? Analyzing and optimizing a single web page can take several hours. Submitting the pages take more time. Then analyzing your rankings, re-optimizing the page and resubmitting takes even more time. In short, it is a very manually intensive process.

When choosing a SEO expert, get a long list of references, and contact them! Also, beware of SEO experts that promise top 10 results for very common keyword phrases. For example, if you have a travel website that customers can make hotel reservations on, and your chosen SEO expert claims that he can get you in the top 10 listings for the search phrase „hotels“ on Google take your money and go somewhere else! On the other hand, if you own a hotel in Dallas, Tx and would like to be in the top 5 or 10 on Google when someone types in „Dallas Hotels“ there is a good chance that the expert can deliver the rankings you desire.

SEO Referral Service

If you would like us to recommend a Search Engine Optimization expert that we have investigated and found to be successful and legitimate, just call us.

Pay-Per-Click

You can be at the top of the listings on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Lycos for only $0.05 per click… guaranteed! However, if someone else is doing the same thing for the same keywords you chose, you have to bid against them. Example: If your business is selling civil war bugles, you would bid $0.05 per click on Overture.com and Google Adwords for the search phrase „civil war bugles“. Then every time someone typed in „civil war bugles“ on Google, MSN or AOL (for example) your company would come up at the top of the page and you are MUCH more likely to get the sale. If they click your link, you are charged $0.05. If you word your descriptions carefully to show that your site sells civil war bugles, people who aren’t actually looking to buy a bugle probably will NOT click on your link and that saves you money! If your competitor, Bugles by Bob, also bids then your minimum bid might be $0.09 or $0.30, depending on how much Bob thinks a website visitor is worth! Also realize that you do not have to be #1. Sometimes you can bid on the second or third spot and pay MUCH LESS than the #1 bidder gets. This can be good for you in some cases. If you’re below 10th place, you’re wasting your time.

Low minimum investment: Currently, you can open a Pay-Per-Click account for $50. You will have a good chance to play around with search phrases and descriptions that will draw interested parties to your site. Even if you don’t get any results, you’ve only invested $50 rather than hundreds or thousands on an advertising campaign.

Target your marketing – If you use Pay-Per-Click advertising, you need to make sure that you don’t get seduced into bidding on keyword phrases that are extremely popular. This is a great way of wasting a LOT of money. A good example would be as follows: If you sell cars in Lexington, KY and you bid $0.75 per click, you would indeed be at the top of the list every time someone typed cars in one of the major search engines. However, someone in England, or even Ohio, is not very likely to purchase a car in Kentucky. If you were to bid $0.10 on the phrase „Kentucky Cars“, you would get less traffic, but you would be much more likely to actually get a contact that resulted in a sale… and you saved money as well!

Cost effective – Pay per click can be very cost effective in bringing visitors to your site. The best thing you can do is to educate yourself in the world of Pay-Per-Click and read ALL advice that the pay-per-click engines have to offer!

Utilize existing advertising!

If your company or organization already advertises using traditional media outlets, there is NO earthly reason not to put your website address on them. Period! Put the address on TV, put it on radio, put it on your billboard (big enough for people to see and read from the highway at 60mph), and put it on your print ads.

In addition, you NEED to put your website address on your company vehicles, company letterhead, receipts, business cards, marquee, shopping bags, products, invoices, and anyplace else you can find room to print, stamp or sticker your web address. Are you getting it yet? Get the website address out there!!!

Get Linked

If you want to score well with Google, the top dog in the search engine world, you must have quality links pointing to you. The more popular the site is that is pointing to you, the higher your score is. For example, if you sell Nascar related merchandise, a link from Nascar.com would be worth a lot more than links from Nascar fan pages. Is it worth paying a high ranked page hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for a link? Probably not if you’re only doing it to try to improve your search engine rankings, but you would probably get heavy traffic from a major website  if you were well presented.

Professional Presence

While it is tempting for some companies to have the teenager next door, or the secretary who designs her homepage with Front Page to do their websites, they inevitably end up with a site that has the word AMATEUR written all over it. These are the same companies who think nothing of spending $100,000 – $1,000,000 on a multimedia ad campaign from traditional ad agencies. Web surfers won’t buy from amateurish sites and companies that have informational sites lose out on making a professional impression when their site is designed by amateurs.

Educate Yourself

If you’re reading this, there is a good chance that the ultimate responsibility for building traffic to your web site falls on your shoulders. You need to get educated and fast. There is no better place to do this that to visit a searchengine forum. You need to read, and read, and read some more before you start asking questions here though. Also, take what you read with a grain of salt. Just because one person says it’s so, doesn’t mean it is the truth. We are convinced that there is a certain amount of disinformation on these boards to keep the competition confused. If you read enough on these boards you’ll get the hang of things!

In conclusion

Yes, there is definitely money to be made on the Internet. Billions are being spent every month. There are sales opportunities and opportunities to advertise your organization. Yes, there are ways of getting your website to the top of the search engines. However, it takes money, effort, good old-fashioned hard work and business smarts, but the results are worth it!

Finanztipp: Online Marketing Training für Anfänger!