Many business owners make the mistake of assuming that every new website will attract a flood of visitors overnight; as if there's such thing as Web Pixies who sprinkle magical traffic-attraction dust onto your website. If that sounds like you, then I'm sorry to burst your bubble. There's no such thing as Web Pixies, just as we both know there's no such thing as Santa Claus!

The good news is that with careful planning and execution you can build up a sustainable stream of traffic to your website. In this three-part post, we give you some cost-effective tips and practical strategies for post-launch website marketing.

Start early

Nothing beats time in the market, that's true. The sooner you start these strategies the better you'll be in the long term. The reason being that all of these marketing strategies are basically a function of time - I call this the "snowball effect". In addition to starting as early as possible, it's important to have a clear plan tying everything together.

Measure (and don't forget to act)

Good decisions come only from good information. The first step is to install website tracking / analytics on your website - it tells you heaps of valuable information about your website and how it's performing.

We recommend Google Analytics - it's the best in the industry and free to use. Google Analytics will help you track where visitors are coming from, how much time they're spending on your website, which pages are most popular, what key words they're searching for to locate your website, and much more.

For e-Commerce websites, your website developer can set up goals to track conversion rates and view the shopping cart as a funnel - helping you identify what the likely causes of cart abandonment might be.

You can link your Analytics tracking with your AdWords costings to get detailed and accurate metrics on how much your spending on buying leads and which key words perform the best.

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine crawlers "see" websites differently than humans. Crawlers read the source code rather than the web page itself, so you need to ensure that your website is optimised for search engines - it's important because it's an organic (aka natural) strategy, so there are no recurring costs. Good SEO will enable crawlers to visit every nook and cranny of your website without hindering the crawler's ability to understand your website's content.

Ask your developer whether your website has meta descriptors, search engine friendly links, descriptive page titles, .htaccess filtering, and robots.txt - this is the bare minimum. Nowadays, we develop websites that support more sophisticated SEO functions such as automatic sitemap.xml generator with Google pingback notification.

Be aware of certain SEO strategies which are frowned upon by Google. Many that were popular a few years ago - such as special landing pages, redirectors, key word spamming - are now heavily penalised by Google, and in some instances will get your website banned entirely.

In early 2010, Google introduced a website Quality Score - which looks at how quickly your Home page loads, amongst other criteria - so it's important to have well-designed and efficiently loading code.

To be continued ...

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