- Attract more visitors to our sites

- Convert more visitors to customers

- Keep those customers coming back

What worked last year or the year before might be less successful this year. The playing field changes, and the rules of the game can also change. What should we be looking at for 2006?

Attracting more visitors to our sites

First, take a look at how well your site is doing.

- Are you targeting keyword phrases that people are searching for these days?

- Have you studied what your competitors are doing recently?

- How many inbound links from quality, related sites do you currently have?

- Has your SERP or Google PR changed?

With some do-it-yourself search optimization tools http://articles.websitesource.com/seo_do_it_yourself_8_16_2005.shtml, you can check your site's position in search engines, view its current Google PR, see what words your competitors' sites are optimized for, find out where your site is ranked for search terms, analyze inbound links to competitors' sites, and more. Your site may have been the "it" site for your product or service a couple of years ago, but if you haven't at least kept up with your competitors, potential customers might not make it to your site.

Acquiring inbound links is an ongoing job. If you haven't worked on this aspect of SEO recently, some newer sites are probably good candidates for a link exchange or one-way links to your site. Start by looking at who's linking to your competitors' sites, and look for other sites with related but not competing content.

Also consider the geographical areas you're targeting. To attract more local visitors, get your site listed in local directories and put the name of your city and country in the

Converting more visitors to customers

You've got people coming to your site. Are they buying from you? If not, why not?

Try to look at your site with fresh eyes. Better yet, get someone else to. Do the colors and design look dated? Does the page look good in newer, larger monitors as well as smaller ones? An updated design may be what your site needs to keep it looking like a quality contender in your field.

Analyze your traffic stats. If you have a lot of visitors who don't click beyond the landing page, either you aren't targeting the right visitors or they aren't drawn in once they arrive. On the other hand, if your visitors typically view a number of pages and then leave, perhaps the path of information and action isn't clear enough. Or there may be another problem with your site that's turning people off.

Of course, the above must be compared with the number of returning visitors. Consumers typically visit a site about three times before buying.

Follow the path from arriving at the site — on any page — to reading about a product or service, finding more information, and placing an order. Is the path easy to follow? Do all the links work? If you have another person looking at your site, watch that person's eye movement, observe if any pauses suggest confusion, and listen to the commentary and questions.

Check that the content is current. If you still advertise a special that expired two months ago, for example, it looks like no one is attending to the business.

Do you offer as many payment options as possible? Perhaps you couldn't afford a merchant account to accept credit card payments when you were starting out, but you can now. If visitors often get to the point of sale and then leave, a lack of payment choices that suit them may be the reason.

Keeping customers coming back

Think about your successes over the past year. What products or services were the most popular? How did people find out about them? What positive feedback did you receive? Use all of that information to make your strengths even better.

If you received any negative feedback, look at it as an opportunity to improve your service or product line.

An opt-in mailing list or newsletter is a low-cost, effective way to keep your company name in your customers' minds. During the order process, provide a check box for customers to choose if they want to receive mailings from you. If they choose yes, you have their permission to send them information about specials, new products, and other news.

People online are becoming increasingly annoyed by spam and aware of privacy issues. Your website should include a privacy policy, and your mailings should include a link for recipients to unsubscribe if they want to. Don't send out regular mailings more than once a month, and provide information that's useful to the recipients.

Content 2006-style

Regular new, quality content attracts more visitors to your site and provides a reason to come back. Once thought of as a fad for personal sites, increasingly more businesses are adding blogs to their websites. Blogs provide a less formal medium to convey information, people can subscribe to them and be notified when they have new content, and they keep search engine spiders coming back whenever you add new content. With thousands of new blogs starting up every day, blogs are the wave of the future.

In this blog, we'll be discussing what's new and useful for webmasters and for people who spend a lot of time online. We invite you to stay tuned.