Did Someone Just Come To My Website?

#0Ly $#!t, They Found My Website!

Believe it or not, there are millions and millions of websites that will NEVER be found in most search results top 10 or even first 10 pages. It’s true! The sad fact is that there are probably a lot of really good sites out there on the web. The website owners and the website designers, though, have no freakin idea how to get the site to rank in the search engines, show up for search results…and, if they do, what shows up is not getting them (website owner) “clicks” or “traffic” (a.k.a. people to the site). The people are not clicking on what is showing up for them.

Is this sounding like a site you have seen or maybe even your site?

Or, maybe you have one of those sites that people go to and really *liked*, but they can’t remember how they got there and you didn’t give them any reason to come back (or an easy way to find you again).

This is very common. The good part about this is that, yhep, you guessed it…dunt-dha-da-dah: It can be fixed!

Ever since I started fiddling with digital design and “the internet”, I’ve been fascinated with “tweaking” the visual result. Sadly, that is also another reason that it takes me so long sometimes to finish my own personal websites. They are mine, so I like to play with them and tweak them and then tweak them some more, or maybe rip it down like a crazed artist and slap up a 301, 404 or other redirect and “poof” that page is gone like a reused canvas. Heck, sometimes I’ll just get bored with them and leave them for a while and see what happens. If it starts getting clicks and traffic or sign-ups and sales, I’ll go back and give it an update or over-haul

I’ll never forget the day I made a website with “the whole thing as 1 big graphic”. It was really funny now looking back on it. Actually, it is horrendously comical.

See I had this program called FrontPage and it would let you “add” clickable links with these “hotspots”. The “hotspots” were shapes that would “link” to other pages or anywhere else on the web. So, I kept adding the graphics (building it in Photoshop) and “hotspoting” them until I had all these pages linked together…It worked fine…On My Local Machine!

So, the next day…

I went and said to a friend, “hey, pull up [www.sitenamethatihad.com] and check out my new website I just made (with the added…”and let me know what you think” grin) Well, to my amazement, somehow, all that showed up was this little, tiny red box with an “x” in it at the top left of the screen.

gheeezz…What Happened…???

Well, that was the worst website I ever made (the graphics were kinda cool though) but it started something turning in my mind. Something at that point told me, like looking into a magical crystal ball, that I was someday going to be doing this stuff and people would be asking me for it.

Plus, at that time, I knew “squat” about “title tags”, “robots text”, “descriptions”, “keywords”, “alt tags”…none of it. Not an inkling. Nor anything about getting “traffic”? or “making an offer” to my visitors???

I thought that they were just supposed to magically come and see it and they would like it and want to know who I was and call me and say, “hey, I like your site”…seriously.

Now, today, you drop in some videos, auto-responder lead capture forms, RSS feeds, photo galleries, community forums and membership profiles, blogs, ecommerce solutions…and the list goes on and on.

Then, you have the whole Online Marketing gaumet and web’y 2.0 stuff…forgettaboutit…

And the “tracking”…What?

Every site, weather I’m redoing it or building it from scratch or consulting with the website owner, I install a tracking program. In an existing site, it is critical, because we need to know what this current website traffic a.k.a. “website visitors” are doing when they get there.

Now, I prefer Google Analytics, if you want other features, there are others but, Google really offers some great stuff for website owners and webmasters. Things that will help you know, fairly quickly and easily, just how effective your website is and some good statistics to know what you might need to do, change or try.

= People Get Excited When They See Their Traffic Reports =

(No, not the one from the DMV)…even if it is only 10 people a day (or a few thousand a month), people love to see that they are “being found on the web” or “I’ve been Goggled for “my_widgets”. And you know what, I do too!

It is exciting to see that you are being found – that that person found you, looked at three (3) pages, was on your site for 8 minutes and 32 seconds and came for “x-site” searching for “search_specifics+your_widgets”, filled out an contact form on your website with their information

That is a really great email to get. They are my favorites.

NOTE: This will not happen when you make your site with 1 big graphic

But, it can, and usually will happen, when you have a website that is built using advanced website development strategies, a dose of SEO and an understanding of your ideal website visitors.

Add some more of the above, combined with some advanced internet marketing strategies and you could start wondering what the h3!! was going on before!

If you find yourself needing or wanting more with your current website services (or non-existent), feel free to inquire about a review and/or analysis.

Thanks for reading…feel free to share, comment or contact me:

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