Click Here to Install Silverlight*
United KingdomChange|All Microsoft Sites
Microsoft
Small Business Centre 
|Products|Offers|Downloads|Small Business +|Contact Us
Search for


MicrosoftSB tweet
Top Five.... Ways to get more site traffic for free

Top Five.... Ways to get more site traffic for free

Top Five.... Ways to get more site traffic for free

If you're using Office Live to build your website, you probably want some site visitors! There are two key ways which marketing professionals use to get more traffic:

  • Pay per click (PPC): paying for site traffic from visitors to search engines
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): making your site more visible to search engines for free!

Ideally, you need to do both of these, but the freebie option (SEO) often gets ignored- and that's a shame, because it's easy to put right. Search Engine Optimisation is rather like painting your home before you show it to the estate agent: it makes the site more attractive. And the time to optimise is when you're building your site. Here are our top five tips:

  • Put in text navigation links
    Sites which use Flash, or just pictures, for navigation aren't search-engine friendly. No matter how visually glamorous your site is, include some text links somewhere (many smart sites put them at the bottom of the page).
  • Don't forget the title
    The Title Tag really matters. Make it descriptive; for example:
    <TITLE>Bodgett Plumbers - Plumbing for Oldham and Rochdale</TITLE>
    Put a title tag on all your pages - either the same one on all of them, or something descriptive of each page as appropriate. Whatever you write, your page will perform better than missing the title tag out completely!
  • Sprinkle in the keywords
    Search engines look for keywords on your pages, which help them to assess where you should appear in their rankings. Make sure you squeeze a few keywords into the text which appears on each page. Our plumber in Oldham might, for example, make sure that words like ‘leak’, ‘repair’ and ‘burst pipes’ regularly crop up in the text. Don't compromise your pages so that they read badly; instead make sure your keywords subtly appear.
  • Encourage Inbound Links
    This isn't easy, but these days it's one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation. Many search engines judge your value by ‘link popularity’ - the number of other sites which link back to your own site. So get links back to your site (without spamming) wherever you can - for example by posting onto forums or getting links from a trade association, or even just your friends. Every link back is a SEO golden ticket.
  • Give your pictures "Alt" tags
    Okay- one technical tweak. A search engine can't see what's in a picture; whether it's your logo or a picture of your shiny van. Therefore, images also include what's called an "Alt" tag, which explains what's in the picture- and this can be read by search engines. Office Live lets you add Alt tags to pictures, so use them. "The Bodgett Plumbers van" will do nicely.
 
 
 
Create your own website. It

Related Products

 

©2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Contact Us |Terms of Use |Trademarks |Privacy Statement
Microsoft