Your organization has made a significant investment into building a good looking website. It has a great look and feel, all your products and services are listed, you have client reviews and success stories, your CEO loves it, and it is going to magically start generating new leads and increasing sales overnight. If this is you, then I’m glad you’re reading this post. Traffic to your website does not happen overnight. It does not happen on it’s own. It does not “just happen”.

Now more than ever, generating traffic is a very difficult task. It is an art, and a silver bullet does not exist. Even if you have successfully created and launched a website that generated traffic in the past, it does not mean you will be able to use the same techniques on a new website. Algorithms within search engines get modified constantly and more websites are launched daily. The internet grows by the second worldwide, so finding your website across the internet could be harder than finding a needle in a haystack.

To launch a successful website you need to spend time performing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO is the process required for your website to be found when someone does a search on Google or Yahoo!. If you do a search and your website is not on the top three results or even the first page, that should be a hint that you do not have a successful SEO strategy.

To SEO successfully you need to understand your own content and your targeted audience. Most importantly, you need to have fresh content that is trust worthy.  This means third-party websites have either talked or written about you on a story, blog, review, etc. Your content needs to also be updated frequently and have the appropriate meta tags that truthfully and accurately describe your business. Meta tags are pieces of content and information that are part of your website for search engines to “better understand” what your website is all about.

To read more about SEO a good starting point is at Wikipedia.

Once you have put efforts into your website being found by search engines and your visitors are increasing, it is time to market it. Marketing your website is easy, but could also be very expensive if you don’t know what you are doing. Making sure you spend time identifying the keywords that best describe your business is the best way to get the greatest ROI. Once the keywords have been identified, purchase ad space on search engines such as Google and Yahoo! so that your ad is displayed when potential customers do their search. To learn more or SEM, visit Wikipedia.

So remember, a good looking website will not increase your online presence unless you invest on SEO and SEM. Tell us your stories on implementing SEO or SEM for your website so that we can all learn more.