A question that is raised by some of our clients is ‘Why am I not getting any traffic to my site?’. This question is usually raised within the first couple of weeks since the launch and this is the exact reason why.

It takes time for a website to be efficiently ‘crawled’ by search engines and once this happens your site will start to appear in search results.

Patience is a virtue here! In our experience we’ve had a website picked up in a couple of days and other times a few weeks. Once the search ‘crawler’ has picked up your site it will then take a few days for your website to settle within the search result rankings.

What effects my search ranking?

There are a number of issues, but these are the main ones:

• How competitive your chosen keywords are
• Your websites structure and ease of navigation
• If your website code is clean, tidy and validates
• How many ‘backlinks’ you have (relevant and genuine links to your website from other sites)

Tired of waiting?

There are a number of ways to drive traffic to your site before it becomes settled in with the search engine rankings.

• Pay Per Click Advertising – this enables you to appear in the ’sponsored’ Google links in search results using the Google AdWords program.
• Social Media Marketing – setup a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account to produce some direct traffic to your site.
• Good old fashioned marketing – business cards, brochures, leaflets and networking are classic ways of getting people interested in your services and in turn your website.

So the question is, why would you need to use a different browser?

The main reason is security – as identified in the recent Google China hacks. Many of the viruses, spyware and adware across the internet are made possible because of the flaws in Internet Explorer, sometimes requiring nothing more than the user visiting an infected website or tricking them into installing software.

What can be done to stop this?

The simple answer is to user a different and more secure browser.

• Firefox is the most popular alternative, which is publicly proud of its security and also its flexibility in terms of the thousands of ‘add-ons‘ you can install to help you become more productive.
• In 2008 Google launched its own browser ‘Chrome‘ which is renowned for its speed and ease of use.

Most organisations send out their marketing messages directly to other Twitterers’ inboxes, whilst others choose to send out links within their tweets.

What they don’t seem to understand is that most of the ‘twitter verse see these as nothing more but annoying spam.

Below is a list of 5 hints that, if followed correctly, will hopefully see your followers increase, clickthroughs soar and customer loyalty strengthen:

1. A personal approach
Try and be as personal as possible, not like a corporate robot repeating the same marketing messages.

2. Respond
Always be sure to respond to any form of contact, be it a @ reply or a direct mail. This will add to 1.

3. Don’t use hash-tags!
You’ll notice that some people add the most popular hash-tags on to their tweets to attract more responses. This doesn’t work – its just as bad as spamming!

4. Re-tweet useful links
If you find a tweet that is likely to be of interest to your followers/customers, then re-tweet it – they may just thank you.

5. A support desk
You could use your Twitter account as a live support desk for your goods or services. Many businesses are doing this – just make sure you have the time and resources to use it efficiently.