Remember that a lot of people will view your site after hours - when you are closed.

Having your email details or a "contact form" on your web site is great way of letting people contact you without having to write down your details and call you the next day.

Make sure your email link is prominently displayed on your home page and ready to go.

ARE YOU MONITORING YOUR WEB BUSINESS?

Keeping statistics on everything about your web site can provide valuable information.

Make sure that you are getting the statistics you need to show how many people visit your site, when they do it, what they click on, what page they leave on, and more.

And make sure you get statistics on all the advertisements or links you place - that way you'll know if they're worth it.

17 September 2001

THE IMPORTANCE OF WEB SITE LINKS

Increasing the number of web sites that have links pointing to your site is an extremely important strategy that has many benefits. Lets talk about some of those benefits, and also how you can work towards increasing your links.

It is of course true that more links to your site means more traffic. The statistics for our web site, http://www.southwestecommerce.com, show that a very large percentage of our traffic comes from people clicking on our link from another web site.

But the amount of traffic you get will depend on the quality and popularity of the sites that are linking to yours. Naturally, if you have your web site link placed on very popular sites, chances are you will bring in a lot more traffic. But just as important as popular sites is the type of site your link is on. If the web site somehow complements your own, then the quality of the links will be much higher.

For example, say you sell landscaping and gardening supplies. Having a link placed on a web site for patios or home improvements will bring in traffic that is more likely to be interested in purchasing your product, than traffic that comes from a computer web site or a general links page. Therefore, choosing who links to you is just as important as how many link to you.

How do you go about getting these kinds of links? These sorts of quality reciprocal links usually only come about by negotiation and mutual agreement. Once you find a business or web site you would like to link with, simply contact them and ask if you can have a link from their web site to yours. You will usually need to offer a link in return. There are some services out there that will do this sort of work for you by searching out quality link partners and taking care of all the negotiations and arrangements.

But another very important benefit from having a high number of quality links is the effect it has on search engine ranking. A lot of the major search engines use "link popularity" as a main factor in determining where your site should rank. If your site has a lot of high quality sites linking to it, the search engines can assume it is a popular site and therefore should rank higher.

The search engines are smart though, in that they are now starting to look at not only the number of links pointing to your site, but the type of links they are. The types of links can be viewed in two ways:

First, links pointing to your site from other popular sites can indicate that your site is of better quality and deserves higher ranking. That is, a handful of good quality links, with some engines, is better than 100 links from sites that are not popular.

Second, some search engines can check the content of the sites linking in to your site (and in some cases, the content of the sites you link out to). Therefore, if a gardening site is pointing to yours, this could be seen as saying your site is about gardening in some way. If the content on your site is about gardening, then this will increase that theme even more and you may be ranked higher on gardening keywords.

The overall strategy? Obtaining as many high quality links as possible will greatly increase your web site traffic - both through the direct links and also through higher search engine ranking.

Want any more info on this article? Email us at admin@southwestecommerce.com

Disclaimer: This newsletter is designed to provide information only and is not a substitute for advice that is specific to your business. Before acting on any of the information above it is important you seek further advice from a professional who has taken into consideration the nature and circumstances of your business.