Building a website and getting it online is easy. Driving visitors to it is the more difficult part. Most people are not patient enough when it comes to build up traffic. They expect thousands of visitors a week after they go live with their website. But that is not how it works. We share some secrets of how to make your website more successful.

A) Provide content: Search engines love content. As more content you can provide as better off you are. Don't put all the content on one page. Build many pages with content. The reason for this is that every page gets spidered separately by Google and other search engines. Each page of yours in their index is an additional chance that your link gets mentioned in somebody else search results. Quality content is more valuable to search engines as they want to provide real information to visitors. Search engines do not want to refer to link farms or redirects. If they can refer a customer directly to the most valuable content the better for the search engine. Search engines live of providing good results.

B) Domain Name: Do not use a domain name like www.freewebpages.com/~yourname - search engines don't like those. It also prevents you from building a brand name (your ultimate goal should be building a brand). Spend the $9.00 per year for your own domain name. It's money spend well worth.

C) Your website design: The simpler the better. Here is a rule of thumb: text content should outweigh the html content. The pages should be W3 validated and work in Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla's Firefox. If you go too fancy with stuff some search engine spiders might not be able to read your pages. Look at Google, eBay or Yahoo themselves - simple design, easy to navigate and people are flocking to it. If you use sub-directories the directory names should be descriptive (i.e. "steel-products" or "paper-clips"). The same is true for you pages. If you are able to give pages a descriptive name as better you are off in the long run.

Website performance is critical. If your pages load too slow you will punished. Make sure the website sits on a fast web server and that the page sizes are 20K or less. If you can keep page sizes to 15K or less you are ahead of the curve.

D) Build one content page per day or at least 3-4 per week. You may think you do not have that many products. But establish yourself as a source of product or industry related information. If customers can learn from the content you provide they respect you and your business and this will lead them to use your services and products, too. Pages with 300-600 words should be more than sufficient.

E) Keywords: Make sure you use important keywords in the title of each topic and through-out the text without looking like a SPAMMER (meaning: do not go overboard using the keywords). Find out what important keywords for your business are.

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Christoph Puetz is a successful small business owner (Net Services USA LLC) and international author.

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