Monday, January 03, 2011

I built a website for my Deck Company-- Now why won't my phone ring?

You have built a few decks, took a few photos and now you have paid a webmaster to create a website for you. You did what the webmaster said and submitted it to every directory you could find and all the search engines... 3 months later. Nothing.

Your webmaster said he does SEO and could make you rank...

He said it might take a couple of months...

You won't like hearing this, but, it takes YEARS to get traffic on line and that is only if you did EVERYTHING right.

If you hired your phone company to do your website... start again. Sites hosted within domains owned by the phone company do notoriously badly. Google is competing with the yellow pages so they get penalized. Besides... they don't have a clue how to make a web page rank.

If your site is Flash, (A programming language that is invisible to google that features brilliant graphics), you also will need to start again.

If your site is only 5 pages and doesn't change monthly... you better give out thousands of business cards and flyers because nobody will ever find you on line.

Getting web traffic is at minimum a part time job. It takes research, some basic knowledge and you had better be a good communicator and do beautiful work or you are simply wasting your time. 

So you have already built your website and you may as well keep it up and running and make the changes you need to do to get some traffic. You need to set a bar to decide if you are making headway.

Have your webmaster install Google Analytics on your website and give you access to your stats. That way you can find out what they are typing in and where they are finding you from. There will be a wealth of information to be found within the stats. Even if you have a phone company site--install Google Analytics. The best way to discover how to make a site rank is to look at the sites that rank now. Keep in mind though, that the rules change nearly daily and sites will rise and fall at the whim of the internet gods!

I've noticed something disturbing of late when it comes to advertisers on Google Adwords. Would you believe that the phone company has taken to buying adwords to bring traffic to the sites that they created for their clients? So, you go to the phone company, they charge you more so that they can pay google, and Google pays me to help you get traffic in your local area. (You can click on any of the ads on this blog or go to http://www.gardenstructure.com and check the ads below and on the right hand side).

You might be better off just paying GardenStructure.com or Google Adwords and cut the middleman out of the picture. It will definitely be cheaper!

Put simply, GardenStructure.com gets a million visitors a year because we have GREAT content, the most beautiful projects and photography, and insightful information you simply can't find anywhere else. And it doesn't hurt that we have been on line for about 12 years now.

To learn how to become one of our Builders... Go here!    Join Us

Drop by the locations page to see how much traffic we get where you live.

Please don't fall for big claims by many sites that don't actually get traffic. Check this article out to understand how people exaggerate their traffic    Web site traffic explained

L

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