Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Increasing Traffic to Your Internet Business

Kelly Spors answers questions from readers about entrepreneurship
July 31, 2007

Start by figuring out what phrases people are typing into search engines when looking for your type of products online. Once you know that, you can buy paid search ads, such as pay-per-click ads, using those phrases and pepper your site with them to boost its search-engine rankings.

Showing up high in search-engine rankings is very important since most people use search engines to shop for products online.

There are some key-word suggestion tools that help identify popular search phrases, usually available free. For instance, Google Inc.'s AdWords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker.com let you type in words and see which related phrases get searched most often. Type "Made in America" into the AdWords Keyword Tool, for instance, and you see phrases like "clothing made in America" and "toys made in the usa" have been searched fairly often recently. But "toys made in America" was searched hardly at all.

You also can experiment with various search phrases by signing up for an advertising program, like Google AdWords. The programs let you bid on various phrases. The price you bid is what you pay the search-engine provider each time someone clicks on your ad. The more you bid, the higher an ad for your site appears on the right-hand side of a search-results page. These programs have monitoring programs that let you see what phrases are most effective in generating traffic and customers on your site.

Another way to get attention is to position yourself as an expert on the benefits of buying American, says Aaron Wall, an Oakland, Calif., search marketing expert. You might, he suggests, write a blog on your site with daily updates on timely issues that people who buy American goods care about, such as U.S. manufacturing trends and product safety. A blog should draw more traffic and links to your site, which, in turn, should boost your site's ranking on search engines.

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