Internet users’ most visited websites are not difficult to divine. They are almost all household names. While some jostling and shifting takes place, at any given time the top ten list always contains Google.com, Facebook.com and the ubiquitous (pardon the pun) YouTube.
If you are the owner of an active website and keen to attract traffic, the foregoing data offers little encouragement. Perhaps more helpful is learning about some of the websites that crop up further down the list. Featuring within the most popular 500 are several well-known retailers, blogging sites like LinkWithin, review sites including tripadvisor, news disseminators like Forbes.com and an abundance of interactive games. The niches that these represent are repeated throughout the top-hits (oops, another unintentional pun). Some also have a high street or shopping mall presence, making their popularity rather easier to achieve.
Popularity of course breeds popularity, so for everyone relying on the internet to promote their business and either generate sales or at least attract advertising, the first breakthrough can be thrilling. Once one’s search engine ranking becomes respectable, the self-generating principle should kick in, and visitor numbers increase dramatically.
The obstacles to those desirable search engine rankings are sometimes technical and hence fixable. It is always worth spending time addressing those barriers that are within your control. Among these are the following:
* Abolish Flash from your landing page. Its text (such as ‘Click to Enter’) may be all that the search engines are seeing.
* Make the text more important than the images; remember that search engines don’t ‘read’ images.
* Get as many links between your site and others as you possibly can.
Lastly, be really clear what your keywords are. To do this, imagine what you would enter in the search field if looking for a site like your own. Now, take those words and in plain text (not within graphics, or embedded in Flash, nor in JavaScript), get those words into your home page.