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.