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The first step towards maximizing traffic is creating a search relevant list of keywords and phrases.

Keep your Site Open All Hours

We've put together this three part guide to help you maximise traffic to your website from day one. To start with you need to plan how people are going to find your new site. Then consider how it will be used and the best ways of promoting the site in order to sustain and increase visitor numbers.

Part 1 - Before you Launch

Consider the customer and terms they may use as they search. Then create an effective keyword list relevant to your business, organisation, products or services and use them in your meta tags, headlines and text.

The better the list, the the better your chance of attracting people specifically looking for what you have to offer .

Meta All

Meta Tags | offer the web site owner the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines. The most valuable to enable a site to be found are:

Meta Title | Use about a dozen words concentrating on the company name and specific keyword phrases and relate it to the text on the page

Meta Description | Still enjoys some support, so worth using.

Meta Keywords | Abused for years, so no longer enjoys the support it once had, use it sparingly and don't waste too much effort on it.

Meta Robots | This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.

Meta Everything Else | Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.

Sitemap and Robots.txt

A clear, well-structured xml sitemap will help get all of a sites pages indexed quicker. Google has guidelines for submitting a sitemap file. Robots.txt will provide standing instructions to visiting spiders, which help a site to indexed faster and more accurately.

Optimize for Local Business

The three major search engine players, Google, Yahoo! and MSN are the first point of search when looking for a product or service in locally. Stand out from the competition and put your business at the forefront of local search, by using locality in tags and content.

Relevant & Reciprocal Links

Your site's ranking is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. You can ask customers and suppliers to link back to you and can add some brief text to reinforce the relevance. Some directories will also ask you to place a link from your site back to them. Links help provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

Site Analytics

How do you know if your SEO efforts are truly working, which keywords found your site and the content that most interested a visitor? If you want quality, converting traffic as a result of your promotional efforts and measure key performance indicators use Google Analytic.

Content

Make sure content is original, relevant and update it frequently, This will keep the content fresh. Pages with an older timestamp might be viewed as static, outdated, or already indexed. Usability, descriptive and informative content will keep visitors coming back.

Key Copy

The first step towards maximizing traffic is creating keywords and phrases that relate to you and your business. The more refined, the more likely that the people specifically looking for what you have to offer will find you. We are not talking visitor numbers here, but more specific targeted traffic that has a better sales or enquiry rate. Consider the audience you're targeting and create a list of relevant words and phrases. Then using available keyword suggestion tools such as, Google Adwords Keyword Tool or KeywordBox research the top keywords and use them as a basis for your title tags, main headings, sub headings and first couple of paragraphs.

Part 2 Online Visibility