. . .  It might be    . . .

Not for the first time, nor the last, will you hear or see “traffic is the lifeblood of your website”. Without a website you are invisible and without traffic, your website is worthless.

The trouble with many business websites is they’re static. Very little changes. Not too bad in business areas that remain pretty static, but in areas that have a high rate of change a static website is worse than useless.

Business websites are marketing tools.Their purpose is to provide information which in turn ultimately leads to sales. Unfortunately many have been left to techies and specialist companies to develop with little control from the customer. They are a beautiful display of the developers art, full of flash images, pop-ups, animations and sound, and they take forever to open.
What use is that? People use the Internet to get answers to questions or look for information. How many will hang around while a website takes minutes to load even if they are listening to music? You have the visitors attention for 7 seconds, or they’re gone, never to return.

So there is a dilemma. What is a business to do that has an expensive website that never changes or one that takes so long to open that no-one sees it?  Either way the search engines won’t rank it and that adds to the downward spiral.

Savvy businesses have realised that Blogs that are regularly updated and which provide useful information, often answering questions posted in forums and other online services such as Yahoo Answers, are readily picked up by the search engines and help improve search rankings. And Blogs are where you include the links to your website.

And the same goes for Articles.

Forward looking business owners have also realised that people buy from people. They don’t buy from the thousands of adverts they’re exposed to every day without knowing who they’re buying from. And this has driven the growth in businesses setting up Facebook pages and posting on Twitter, joining LinkedIn etc.etc. But that is a whole new topic.

In summary, if you want to use your wbesite as one of your marketing tools, make sure everyone sees it. The two sayings “content is king” and “If you’re not moving forward you’re going backwards, there’s no standing still”  are as true as ever.

If you are a small business in the travel, tourism or activities sectors, take a look at traveljunkies to see how we can help you.

To start with, we’ll give you a free listing in the traveljunkies directory. It’s completely free, no strings, and if you don’t want to use traveljunkies to promote your business, you’ll still have your free listing.
You can get your free listing by going to www.traveljunkies.com and clicking on the link in the side box.

And one final thing. Already more than half Internet searches are made using a mobile device, mostly phones, and it is growing. This kills slow loading websites.

Cliff Chapman
traveljunkies

Worldwide adventure travel & activities directory & search engine, like Google only smaller.

Follow