Advertising on other websites can be an excellent way to bring targetedtraffic to your website. However, much advertising is over-priced, and you should evaluate each opportunity to ensure you are getting value for money.

Make sure you know how many visitors the website receives to the section on which you wish to advertise. Ask how many visitors other advertisers in the same section receive each month. Attempt to calculate how much you will essentially be paying for each visitor, and compare this with your other advertising.

If you proceed with the advertising, ensure you track its success using your website statistics package. Ideally, use statistics features such as Google Analytics’ Goal Funneling, which can help you track the origin of actual sales back to websites on which you advertise.

And if in doubt, ask the advertiser for a free trial — most websites will have sufficient confidence in their website traffic to allow this.

There are various ways you can refer your website address in a written format. For example;

• http://www.example.com
• http://www.example.com/
• www.example.com
• example.com

None is more correct than another (although, on a technical level, there are differences.) You should check to make sure that your website is accessible without the ‘www’ — this is dependent on your web host, and in most circumstances, if it is not configured this way, it is easy to change (and you should request this.)

Then, you need to consider and adopt a consistent way of displaying your website address. Consider these factors when making your decision:

• The ‘http://’ takes up a fair bit of space
• The ‘www’ stands out and is immediately recognisable as a website address
• The shortest form, example.com, can be more easily associated with your business name, and is easier to speak (which makes it easier to remember)

Whichever you choose, be sure to maintain consistency!

“Can you include this list of keywords in the meta tags so my website ranks in the search engines.”

It still surprises me when a new client asks this question — and I’ve made it my life goal to hunt down and lambast the last remaining person who is pushing this concept!

Search engines have ignored this tag ever since the first SEO folk began stuffing it with irrelevant yet amusingly hopeful keywords. That was 1999. Let the thing die.

Knowing how your website visitors arrived at your website helps you hone your marketing efforts and focus your advertising spend.

Even if you do not spend money on advertising, understanding who or what refers you business empowers you to nurture particular relationships and explore similar opportunities.

To help you better track your website referrers, you can:

• Ask for visitors to tell you where they found you as part of your enquiry, booking or sales form
• Run reports in your website statistics software to see which websites refer traffic (and turn into sales, if the software supports it)
• Ask your web developer to write a script that allows you to track online and offline advertising campaigns by assigning promotional codes to the website addresses used in the advertising
• As part of your post-sales procedure, ask new customers to recall where they first heard about you, and dig beyond just “I found your website”

It can be difficult generating a buzz for a business website, but without other websites actively linking to yours, it can be a slow road to achieving the traffic and search engine rankings that come from a strong internet profile.

You can encourage this by adding unique, fresh, relevant, timely and informative content to your website. Depending on the nature of your business, you could achieve this through regular articles, blog posts, photo galleries, whitepapers, knowledge bases or user-generated opinion.

Through useful content comes respect as an industry leader, and people like to quote leaders.