5 Quick Tips to help get Website Traffic

Your website is one of the most important aspects of your business.  It is normally one of the first places a potential customer will go to find out about your business, you products and services and you! It is also where many potential customers will find out how to contact you, usually via a contact page but also your other means of communication, for example a phone number or social media links.

The more visitors you have to your website the better your sales and profits (one would hope!). These tips presume you know your niche and your keywords. I also presume that you conduct regular keyword research to stay on top of what's popular within your niche.

1. Make sure you are actually tagging your keywords.
   
   Online, one of the most significant keys to success is getting website traffic.  The more visitors you have, the better your sales and profits.  Presumably you have a niche and you know your keywords, and regularly conduct keyword research to stay on top of what’s popular.  Based on those assumptions here are five quick and easy tips to get website traffic fast!
   
   
   Do you spend a lot of time optimizing your content and then neglect to tag them on your webpage?  Tags are where search engines look and if there are no tags they’ll pass right by your web pages.  Here’s a quick brief on tags.
   
   There are a number of tag types including,
   
   * Title tags.  Title tags are quite possibly the most important place to situate your keywords.  Here’s what they look like - <title>Primary keyword phrase here. </title>
   
   Your title tag is where you place your primary keyword or keyword phrase.  The sentence will describe your business in less than 90 characters. 
   
   * Header Tags.  Header tags are next in order of importance to search engines.  They’re ranked in order of importance and look like this - <h1>Primary and/or Secondary keywords here</h1>
   
         The “1” designates this header as the most important header on the page.
   
   * Meta Tags. Meta tags provide the small descriptive text found underneath the title tag on the search engine results page.  Like title tags these should be kept brief, informative and up to date.
   
   * Alt Tags.  Alt tags are used to provide a text description of a graphic.  Each graphic on your site should have a description and an alt tag. 
    
2. Add content to your site regularly.
   
   Content is essential for traffic and a top search engine ranking.  Content is what search engine spiders look for and index - without it there’s nothing to index or rank.  Give visitors and search engines a reason to visit and index your site. Make a commitment to provide regular, optimized content and your traffic should increase.
    
3.  Procure valuable and relevant incoming links
   
   The more websites which link to your webpages the more valuable search engines perceive you to be, though not all links are created equal.  Search engines give more leverage to links from sites which are popular and credible and from sites which are relevant to your website topic. 
   
   There are different types of links.
   
   - A direct link looks like a basic website address, for example, www.yourwebsite.com
   
   - A text link occurs when the webpage address is embedded in the text.  Readers simply click on the link and are redirected to a new website page. 
   
   - If the link is to an internal web page, for example an article published on a website, rather than the home page, it is called a “deep link.”
   
   
   You can encourage linking to your website by:
   
   * Adding content to your site. 
   * Submitting to article directories. 
   * Publishing press releases. 
   * Blogging and participating in social networking forums, chat rooms and social networking sites. 
    
4. Be Social!
   
   Now more than ever before, internet marketing is about building a community.  Whether you offer a forum on your website or you participate in social networking sites, social networking is a valuable traffic generating tactic.  Sites like Facebook and Twitter can be powerful tools for generating links and traffic to your site – create a profile and then post comments, links to your site and ideas which generate conversation. 
   
   Get involved - many chat rooms and forums are industry specific, find those which cater to your industry, and begin participating.  Speak to and connect with a highly targeted audience. 
    
5.  Advertise for more exposure and traffic
   
   Advertising, when handled strategically, can be used to promote your content and products or services.  PPC advertising is often the tool of choice because you control the advertising budget on a daily basis and have the tools to test and track your advertising efforts.  Once you’ve honed your PPC ads the return on investment can be phenomenal in terms of traffic and purchases.   
   
   I hope that in this blog there are some tips that you can take back to your own business to help gain more traffic to your website. Although no expert, these are some of the things that I have learnt over the years and have helped me with my business.

Are you still using Windows XP?

Are you still using Windows XP as the operating system for your PC or laptop?

In September of 2007 Microsoft communicated their plans to end support for Windows XP SP3 and how that may affect your business.  Microsoft recognizes how integral Windows XP may have been in your operations and valuable to your employees, thus they have provided support for these past 12 years. The time has come for Microsoft and us to invest our resources toward supporting more recent technologies such that we can continue to deliver great new experiences for you as your IT environment evolves to meet the changing needs of your users in this increasingly social and mobile world. 

After April 8, 2014, technical assistance for Windows XP will no longer be available, nor will automatic updates be sent that have helped protect your organization’s PCs (including home users). For specific details, please review Microsoft’s Windows XP end of support information here. 

Microsoft continues to take steps to help all users, including home users, of Windows XP understand what end of support means, when it will take place, and what steps they can take to move to a modern operating system (ie. Windows 8.1) and Windows devices. Therefore, beginning March 8th, 2014, users using Windows XP (Home and Professional editions) who elected to receive updates via Windows Update will receive an end of support notification through Windows Update.   The message will state, “Windows XP End of Support is on April 8^th, 2014. Click Here to learn more.”  While the message is scheduled to recur monthly, users have the option to click “Do not show this message again.”  Enterprises that are managing their infrastructure using WSUS will not receive the notifications.

If you are still using Windows XP now is the time to consider upgrading your operating system, we use Windows 8.1 here at Convallis and can assist with your upgrade decision.

Don't leave it too late and leave your computers vulnerable plus don't forget not all modern software works with Windows XP.

Twitter - Information Network?

This blog post was originally published on the Convallis Software website

in 2012 but I think that it it is still just as relevant today.

I ended up being involved in a conversation which started after the remark of a top Twitter manager when he described Twitter as an Information Network. Many folk seemed to be disagreeing with that view and were
keen to call it a social network, and expressed concerns that Twitter management don't 'get it'.

I have to say I think calling it an Information Network is a far more accurate description.

Let's examine what Twitter does at its core. It takes data, which is passed into its systems by a client application which must have identified itself and its user to Twitter, and then delivers that data to all the other user accounts that follow the identified user. Incredibly, that data is in general only ever delivered to any given destination once, that's in spite of the hundreds of millions of messages that are generated every day. That's quite an impressive technical feat.

So Twitter is a huge and (hopefully) well engineered broadcast messaging system, i.e. it broadcasts the message to all those who have expressed an interest in following the user.

Why an Information Network? From a computer science point of view all those messages are being moved around a network, and each user could (I think) be considered to be a node on that network both generating and consuming content. But there's more to it than that.

Social Networking seems to be one of those things that raises a lot of passion in people, personally I don't pretend to understand why. But I think (and this is only an opinion) that Social Networking is just one of many Twitter use cases, albeit an important one.

There are others, a broadcast messaging system can be used to simply announce an event, or the publication of a new article or to inform a user that a particular event has occurred (a server backup for instance, although there are perhaps better ways of doing that). None of these use cases are 'social' (although the word seems to be redefined so often that it's difficult to know), especially if bots are used to send them - but that doesn't mean that people won't follow that account if they have sufficient interest in the subject matter.

I suspect that since it was first created, its users have created many use cases for it (probably even most of them) that weren't even imagined when Twitter was first designed.

So I think that the Twitter management view of Twitter as an Information Network is actually reassuring, because it means it's less likely to be pigeon holed into serving any one particular use case.

Author: Richard Isaac - originally published March 2012