January 10, 2006 (Updated June 10, 2008)

By Matthew Bates

Part 1 / Part 2

6) You will need to start tracking your website to see how many people are coming to see it. I have used many stat counters in my day and I have found one that I really like. It is called StatCounter.com and it offers free statistical data for your website. All you have to do is add a small bit of code to the pages of your website and you will be able to instantly track who comes to your website, on what pages and even what they wrote in which search engine to find you. This is an immense tool to help you realize where your visitors are coming from. Once you see patterns of traffic, you can emphasize those parts of your website that seem to be getting better traffic. One of the big surprises is that not everyone comes into your site from the homepage. This means that every page of your site should have a small menu on the bottom so that any visitor can find their way around from any page on your site. Make sure that you add the invisible tracker, as visible tracker buttons are tacky and tend to make your site look unprofessional.

7) Forget about flash. If you have an all flash site, you had better get busy and write some html because all of the major search engines have a hard time seeing the content inside a flash file. They can see the file, but that is about it. All of the juicy keywords contained in your site should be extremely easy to find for the search engines. This means that the menus on your site should be simple text hyperlinks. Look at Google, or Yahoo, they don’t have fancy complicated sites, and they are visited by millions daily. Flash can be fun, but keep it to an absolute minimum in your website.

8) Print up business cards with your website address as the main attraction. Many people don’t realize what an incredible tool a business card can be toward promoting their website. We all meet people, even people we have known for years, on a daily basis. All of them would love to do something useful when they surf the web. By giving them a card, they will probably go your site and get more out of it than a random visitor would. If you just write down the address on a piece of paper, chances are that they will completely forget about it.

9) Join an online community, it can be an artistic community like WetCanvas.com , or a general online community like StumbleUpon.com which brings people of all kinds together from all over the world. By blogging your site in online forums you are bringing people to your site that would have most likely not found you on their own. By becoming an active participant in these forums you can generate lots of interest in your site.

Each one of these points has variations on which you can play with. There are many directories to join, lots of search engines to list your site with, and lots of keywords to play with. The most important thing to remember is that there are no short cuts, there is a well worn path which you can follow, and you should follow, as it leads to more traffic. Many companies will promise you thousands of visitors to your site, but unless you follow these points, you won’t get any results. The best part about Search Engine Optimization is that it is free. All it takes is a few hours a week to update your information and track your visitors and you will start getting those absolutely beautiful emails from people all around the world who say they love your work. You may even get offers from galleries, the world is out there just waiting for you. Let your website do what it was made for in the first place!

Part 1 / Part 2

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