It's no good having a fantastic website if no one ever comes to it!
Keeping site traffic up is critical to the success of any website and the main way to do this is with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - making your pages as robot-friendly as possible. Many of our clients now take the coveted top spot on Google and other major search engines and it's amazing how a little bit of work can create very rewarding results. I can help you to do well in the rankings as well as provide traffic monitoring tools to keep an eye on how your visitors are using your site.
I have considerable expertise in how to make your website as readable as possible for robots. I ensure all websites I produce are optimized in terms of image alternate descriptions, meta tags, etc, and all sites are valid W3C XHTML and CSS.
The first robots that come to mind are search engine spiders which crawl the internet indexing content so that when people search they are presented with relevant results.
An often forgotten sector of your possible audience is disabled users that rely on screen readers to literally read out the content of the site. As with search engine robots, screen readers cannot see your site so have to rely on well written code to convey the useful content of the site to the disabled user.
If you have an existing site, I can inspect the source code and let you know how robots will get on with it at no charge.
Nowadays Google and other search engines look at the number of links going into your website from other sites around the internet. Your position in the results will be influenced by how many other people are linking to you, the relevance of the link and what their ranking is like.
Links are one area where you can help. It's a good idea to set up a links page on your website to link to other similar sites. Then get in touch with other websites and offer to exchange links. More often than not, they'll be happy to do so. As you get more links pointing into your site, you'll get more attention from the search engines and accordingly will start to be ranked higher.
At the end of the day there's no magic formula to jump straight to the top of Google; but with some perseverance from you and us, within a few months you should be impressed with the results.
Publicity for your site doesn't just have to be online. Send out some flyers, advertise in local papers etc. Let customers know you're there. Often word of mouth is a very good way of getting more visitors. It's a cumulative process - as more people know about your site, they'll tell their friends, who in turn will tell others. We've never yet seen a site's traffic suddenly drop after it starts going up. Once you're over the first hurdle you can sit back and watch the traffic rise.
Many hosting companies include some excellent traffic monitoring tools as part of the package. If not, or if you're going for our hosting option, we can offer some useful traffic monitoring features, from the simplest visit counter (visible or hidden) to a site-wide system tracking your visitors' every move. Feel free to ask for further details.