There are many ways of attracting visitors to a website, including the more traditional methods, such as publicity, advertising and other promotional methods.
Investing in the Internet route now yields much greater returns for most businesses than conventional advertising, mail shots and cold calling.
Increasingly, people of all ages and from all walks of life and economic background are turning to the Internet as their prime source of information on products and services.
The Internet is also no longer a preserve of the younger generations. Customers aged 50 and over constituted a major driver of growth during 2006, having come into online shopping later than the younger generations.
People use search engines, and predominantly Google, to find what they want. The user enters a keyword, which may be a single word, a combination of words or a specific phrase. The search engine then returns a list of links to all of the websites that contain the entered keyword.
In the past, search engines could be tricked into giving an artificially high ranking to a website. To prevent this, the search engines have employed increasingly sophisticated means to determine the ranking of individual websites. Led by Google, this has been driven by the need to provide a better service to people surfing the Internet and to obtain revenue from the sale of Internet advertising space.
This advertising, which is known as Adwords in Google's case, appears down the right hand side of the search results page.
Each advertisement is linked to the advertiser's website, so that when some clicks on an advertisement, they are taken to that website. The advertisers pay Google each time someone clicks on one of these links, hence the term "pay-per-click".
Click here to find out more about Google Adwords
As with the normal search results, these advertisements also need to be listed in an orderly fashion and Google employs a combination of the price that the advertiser is prepared pay per click, the rate at which people click on the link and the relevance of the page to which the advertisement is linked.
In essence, Google rewards relevant website content when ranking a website in both the normal organic search results and in its pay-per-click advertising. Good content is equally essential when it comes to sustaining the visitor's interest once they have entered the website.
If you would like to receive a copy of "Attracting Visitors To Your Website", which explains search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising in simple and practical terms, then please click here.
To achieve a high ranking, the website content not only needs to be relevant, but it also has to be kept fresh and up to date. A means of achieving this, both easily and cheaply, is therefore an essential feature of any modern website. This requires easy to use content management facilities as well as automatic means of updating the website content wherever possible.
Click here to find out more about WYSIWYG online content management