A website can be great for your business, but if you don’t get any traffic you won’t have any sales. There are several basic traffic generation techniques that you can utilize from day one of your website launch. By putting these basic traffic generation techniques to work first, you can get your website off to a good start.

Search engine optimization is huge and there are people paying hundreds of dollars for it. However, it is very easy to do on your own. Search engine optimization begins with having a search engine friendly website that is not too heavily laden with graphics. You also need to focus on keywords that don’t have a lot of competition, but are highly searched by people across the web. There are a variety of different keyword techniques you can use, but utilizing one technique will do a lot for generating traffic to your website.

Online advertising is also very popular. Pay-per-click advertising has been seen as expensive, but there are ways that you can utilize it without breaking the bank. Most services will allow you to set your own limit. This limits your exposure but ensures you won’t spend more than you can afford.

Email marketing has been looked down upon because of all of the spam that people receive on a daily basis, but it can be a great marketing tool if used properly. Have your visitors sign up for email updates on your website, generate a list of addresses and offer incentives through emails that will keep your visitors coming back to your website.

Be sure to include your website address on anything and everything that you print. Put it on your business cards, letterhead, envelopes, flyers, print advertisements, radio advertisements and invoices. Don’t forget to include it on your building or sign if you are also a brick and mortar business. These can be great ways to get your website traffic and is one of the most basic traffic generation techniques.

If you aren’t blessed with the ability to design your own websites, you are going to need a web designer for your site. There are a variety of things that you want to look for in a web designer, but most importantly they should be able to do the following three things for you:

Design the site to your specifications
Design the site in a reasonable time frame
Design the site at a fair cost

Of course, these three things will depend on the site and the complexity of it, but all web designers should be able to meet these three criteria.

Another thing to look for in a web designer is experience. Many people easily understand HTML and HTML is capable of producing fairly complex sites that look good as well. However, if you are in need of a user interface and true website architecture you are going to need a professional who has been in the business for at least two years.

A portfolio is important to any web designer and they should be offering links to various sites that they have designed. Look at three samples, at least, and make sure you get an idea of how involved this person is in each project. There are several companies that produce websites, but this does not mean the person selling you the services is going to be involved in the design. It also does not mean that the company as a whole has a lot of experience. You also do not want to choose a company that produces cookie cutter sites that only vary in color and content.

The next characteristic you want to look for in a web designer is one that will spend time with you talking over your needs. They should be able to guide you towards a system that will work for you. They should also be able to provide you an accurate estimate of what it will cost to design your site. Don’t try to haggle, as a professional designer will not be interested in it.

A professional web designer will typically ask for a portion of the payment to begin work. The cost of the project should be directly related to the amount of time it takes to design the site. Be leery of designers who ask for the full amount up front. Also, don’t be afraid to contact references to assess how satisfied they were with the services of your prospective designer. Following these steps should allow you to find the web designer that is capable of meeting your needs.

Search engine optimization is a huge business and more and more web designers are looking for better ways to improve their page rankings on the popular search engines, especially Google. There are several web design tips to improve SEO that web designers can use in the design and coding of their websites.

First of all, people love graphics that move and Flash websites have become extremely popular. The problem, however, is that the search engines do not index graphic sites. These sites are not SEO friendly at all. In addition to this fact, Flash websites can also take a long time to upload and, although they may look cool, your traffic is going to be pretty low. Graphic sites also do not rank well because the text on these sites are also graphics. The text in the graphic is not picked up by the search engines.

Search engines love inbound links. In fact, Google will rank your page according to how many links are on your page and how many links point back to you. This means that the more links you can get pointing back to you the better. Many web designers already know this, but it is simple and cheap to achieve. There are numerous databases that you can place links to your sites in. These are great inbound links for you and will make the search engines pay more attention.

Title tags are also very important to search engines. If you leave your page titled as Untitled or New Page, you will not get a good ranking. Be sure to use keywords and meaningful title tags.

Meta tags are also very important. These are tags placed in the code of your website. These tags allow you to have a description of your page as well as different keywords that the search engines will pick up. These keywords and descriptions are invisible to the people who visit your site.

Keyword density is also important when it comes to your website’s text. This is a large factor in the search engine rankings and you will want to be sure to optimize your site with keywords that are popularly searched. If your links have meaningful and relevant keywords in them, it will also cause your page to be ranked higher. If you use an outside writer for your web content, be sure to inform them of the keywords that you want used in the text of the site for SEO purposes. Most web writers will know exactly what you are talking about.

These few basic web design tips to improve SEO will help your pages get ranked in all search engines. Also, don’t forget that there are several search engines out there and not everybody uses Google. Don’t optimize for Google alone, but optimize for all search engines in general.