Website Hospital

Website Hospital

By Clare Lawrence 18th August 2004



Are you disappointed with your website traffic? Orders are not what you had hoped? This article suggests ways to improve.



Content

What are the keywords you're targeting?


i.e. what phrases are your customers entering into the search engines?



Do they appear on your web pages, if so is their density too high or too low?



For most sites a density of 5 – 7% is disireable. Ie. Your keyword should appear 5 – 7 times e.g. 100 words.



Too low then your pages are not sufficiently relevant.



Too high and you may be tripping spam filters.





Meta Tags

Are you using your keywords in each of your tags, title, description and keywords.



Remember that shorter tags are more focused than longer ones.





Links

Links and keywords in them (anchor text links) are the most important factors forGoogle to get a good ranking.



How many do you have? Where are they? Use a link popularity tool to help track them.



Links on relevant sites are much more valuable than none-related sites.





Listing in directories



There are 100's of free directories on the web. The double benefit of a directory is direct traffic and the benefit of text links. (particularly for Google).



The important directories are:



DMOZ

Yahoo

Gimpsy

Allthebizz

Smallerbizz

MSN smaller business Directory

Joeant



Pay per click

Pay per click can be effective, particularly if you try Google Adverse and Overture.





Poor Navigation


Adding a sitemap is an effective way to help search engines find the way around your site.