Despite the doom and gloom on the high street, e-commerce continues to grow strongly for UK retailers. Online shopping grew by 19 per cent year on year to January 2009 according to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. Nor is it just the “pure-play” internet retailers that are benefiting from this boom such as eBay and Amazon; in Hitwise’s most recently published list of the top UK e-tailers, traditional “bricks and mortar” retailers occupied four of the top ten spots: Argos, Tesco, Marks and Spencer and Next.

As is becoming increasingly clear, a successful internet strategy is vital for companies to defy the tough high street trading conditions. Most companies have now invested in a website but not all are aware of some of the best techniques to attract traffic to their sites and to consequently generate sales.

Here are 10 simple tips to increase traffic to your website:

Firstly it is crucial to understand how the search engines such as Google work and the process of “search engine optimisation”. An estimated 73% of traffic is referred from the search engines. When people type the product or service that your company offers e.g. “ SEO company Leeds”, is your company’s website visible in the first results? Research suggests that 90% of people do not go past the first page of results.

One answer is to pay per click for traffic to your website- these adverts appear on the right hand side of your chosen keyword search results pages. To appear in the “natural results” for which you do not pay, here are some tips for your website to stand out for the search engines:

1) Make sure that the title of your webpages contains the most relevant keywords to your business, e.g. the type of business and not just the name of your business.

2) Make sure that the “meta tags” of your webpages best describe your products or services in a sentence or two using the relevant keywords (if in doubt about either of these points, ask your webmaster to check these tags).

3) Look at your competitors websites that are performing well in the search results to see what keywords they are using in their webpages.

4) Regularly update the text on your site- Google and the other search engines put a great deal of emphasis on new, unique content.

5) Submit your website URL (www.yourcompany.com) to all the main search engines.

6) Review the text on your site for the keywords relevant to your business, which the search engines can find most easily when they are used as links.

7) The search engines put a large amount of emphasis on links to your site from other sites as an indicator of the importance, quality and relevancy of your site. This can be done by exchanging links with other sites (“reciprocal links”) or- more importantly- as “backlinks” from other sites. Backlinks can be generated by submitting you URL to online directories relevant to your business or by forum postings by your company where appropriate (rather than “spam” postings) for example.

8) Starting a company blog is a good way to generate backlinks, to create fresh content on your site and to keep people coming back to your site.

9) Writing articles relevant to your business containing links to your site and submitting it across the web is another effective way to generate backlinks to your site.

10) A sitemap on your website helps the search engine easily identify the different pages of your site.

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Search Engine Optimisation