Once you have published your web site and understand the basics of web hosting, you will be ready to learn more about Internet marketing along with scripting and coding in order to expand your presence on the Internet and increase traffic to your site. If you have had your site on the Internet for any amount of time, you should have started counting the number of hits you are getting, checking out your competition, and looking at your rankings report. If you haven’t, you absolutely have to start doing this every day.
Even if you signed up for a cheap web hosting service, you should have a visitor counter. This will be under your logs reports on your control panel. It may be called ‘latest visitors.’ You should also have a feature that will tell you if visitors are going to any other pages on your site besides the introduction page. If you don’t, you need to have it. If you have very few hits on your site, or lower hits than expected, we will talk about how to increase traffic to your site shortly. The main thing right now is to keep track of how many people are visiting your site on a daily basis so you know how much the improvements that you will be making are helping.
Checking out your competition is important as well. You have to be aware of who ranks above you in a keyword search and what kind of reciprocal links, organic methods, or pay-per-click that they have put in place to get ranked higher. You also have to keep on top of what kind of price points they have for their products, what kind of features they offer, or what kind of information they put forward that makes them a better site than yours. Remember, it takes someone less than ten seconds to move on to another site, so if your site doesn’t have what people are looking for, they are only a click away from looking somewhere else.
Ranking reports are something else you have to think about. Whether you are strictly an ecommerce site or you have a brick and mortar business as well, you have to look at a rankings report everyday to see where you are with the search engines. Some budget web hosting companies will offer a search engine submission service and a ranking report on a trial basis when you first sign up, but at some point you will have to pay for this service. These services aren’t overly expensive, but if you don’t have a ranking report and you haven’t researched the key words that are relevant to your site and put them into your content and Meta tags, your rankings may not go as high as they should. Keyword research and content creation is all part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tactics and should be studied thoroughly to find out what kind of benefits they can provide to your site. SEO is impossible to cover here, but you have to learn about it in order to have a successful website.
What can be said about SEO, along with content and keywords is that you should build your site organically. What is meant by organic is that your site should have a real product, a real service, or a real message. Let’s say, for example, that you sell sunglasses. If you set up a site that has lots of photos of your product and some Flash along with product descriptions, you will have to buy links, advertising, and pay-per-click to get any traffic. This can be expensive, and what happens when you stop buying all of these artificial adverts? Your site disappears. Organic web hosting can prevent this. By writing articles or having a blog on your site which is written around your keywords, you can draw more traffic to your site. This is because in the eyes of the search engines, you are becoming an authority on the subject of a product like sunglasses on the Internet, as opposed to just being a merchant. So as far as SEO is concerned, the best thing that you can do if you sell sunglasses on your site is find keywords that are related to your business like ‘cheap sunglasses’, ‘designer sunglasses’, etc, and make sure that you have content about them on your site. You can find free keyword research sites, and even by writing only a few articles, you can get started on becoming an organically ranked site.
Of course, your content and keywords have to be linked to something. This is where learning web hosting languages and coding comes in. If you have made it this far, it is probably time to ditch that free site builder that your budget web hosting company gave you. FrontPage or Dreamweaver are a logical choice for site builders, because you don’t have to learn as much code, and you can import your current site content to either one. The coding and computer languages that you will eventually need to understand are HTML, ASP, PHP, CGI, and JavaScript, to name a few. This is why you should look for all of these along with Fantastico Deluxe when you sign up for a cheap web hosting company. You don’t necessarily need them when you first start out, but if you want to make anything out of your site, get ready to learn. This is because in order to be effective, your content and keywords can’t just appear on your site, they have to be coded as well. Again, that’s a lot to cover here, but you need to get familiar with HTML at least, as well as what Meta data is and how it can help you.
A lot of this has to do with linking your site to other places on the Internet to improve the amount of traffic that comes to your site. Maximizing traffic to your site through all legal avenues is the most important thing you can do, obviously. Web page hosting is a great way to do this. Web page hosting is basically taking a page of content that is linked to your site and submitting it to article directories. Going back to the sunglasses example, this would mean that you might write an article on sunglasses, based on the keyword ‘cheap sunglasses.’ When someone searches for the key word ‘cheap sunglasses’, hopefully, they will come across your article and then go to your site. In terms of the Internet, you start to become an authority, because you are starting to get inbound links to your site. Very simply put, if your article is out there and linked to your site, you will get higher rankings because the search engines think you have something relevant to say. Logically, it would make sense to develop your site this way, because the effects last longer than artificial means that are paid for to get rankings; hence the term, organic web site building.
Of course, once a viewer gets to your site, you will want it to be functioning so that they can buy your product easily or be able to understand your message. Again, a site builder from your low cost web hosting company is great to start off with, but in order to have a site where people will actually give you their credit card, you will have to have more than static pages. Don’t make the mistake of going overboard with Flash and Streaming Video, however, what we are talking about here are features like drop down menus, interactive forms, shopping carts, rollover buttons, etc. In other words, you want visitors to your site to be able to find information quickly and be able to purchase your product easily.
If you look at other people’s web sites regularly, you understand how convenient it is to be able to use page links, use a ‘search’ feature, be able to look in your shopping cart, have a running total on your purchases, go to drop down menus, and fill out an easy-to -use order form. If you want these kinds of features on your web site, you are simply going to have to become more familiar with coding and computer languages. Even with software like FrontPage, you have to at least understand the concept of HTML code. Otherwise, you will have a web site full of static pages, and when your visitors compare your site to others, they may not have enough confidence in your website design to buy from you. This is not a panic situation; it is just something you have to work out. If you are serious about web hosting, you will either have to spend some money on software, or hire someone else to help; mainly a web developer. Hopefully, you will choose to learn web hosting coding for yourself, which is not as impossible as it sounds. Once you get the right software, there are so many wizards, templates, and free or low-cost Internet sites to help you learn, that you can almost get a computer science degree for free online.
Once you get into coding, you will learn how powerful your website can become. For example, once you learn to create an interactive form, you can connect it to a database. This means that when someone fills out a form on your site with their personal information, you can put their information into a client database. You can them put them on an email list to let them know about special offers or sales.
However, the best service that you can offer is to personalize that customer’s shopping experience on your web site. This is because you can take that person’s information and assign them a code number, which is stored in the data base along with their personal and shopping information. When they log into your site with this code number, you can give them a personal greeting. In return, they can pull up information about former purchases, or update their personal information in your data base. Simple features like this make for a more genuine shopping experience on your web site and keep people coming back.
As you can see, having advanced web hosting skills makes a huge difference in how your site works. Going through everything we have talked about here and learning it step-by step is the best way to take your site to the next level and really make it successful!
