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1. Do you know what segment of population would find your web content interesting? What economical, political and social background are they going to come from? What's going to be gender, and age range, and educational qualification?
2. Are you aware of their surfing habits, their Internet awareness level? Do you know what's frequency of their business transactions through Internet? Are they first time service buyers or seasoned buyers?
3. What's hardware/software your audience is expected to use while logging on to your site? What's their surfing speed and connection speed? Do they have to pay a lot while surfing? Many surfers don't surf with ease because they have to bear heavy telephone connection cost in order to use Net as in Europe and Asia.
It's not sometimes technically and logically feasible to accommodate all points mentioned above, but as one evolves as a webmaster, things can continuously be improved, according to feedback garnered from users, day by day, week by week, month by month.
After you've designed and planned out your web site, you can take following steps to get traffic of your preference:
1. Define your keywords properly for search engines. You don't have to incorporate entire thesaurus for your product. The more you narrow down, more target audience you'll get. Limit yourself to 6-7 keywords if you want to target a highly focussed group. You can also do keyword bidding at various pay search engines like RealNetworks and GoTo.
2. Formulate a concise and to-the-point description of your index page. Try to include words, in a manner that sentence makes sense, that might help search engines find your site.
3. In directories like yahoo!, always choose right heading to add your URL. Don't think that more general heading you choose, more visitors you attract. Remember it's not quantity that matters, it's quality. So go to lowest level before submitting your URL.
4. Try to include major searchable words in first paragraph of your web site content. Many search engines read first 250-300 words of a page to index it.
5. I've noticed search tools like Google use title of page to give it recognition. But recommendation by gurus of web development is that title should be name of your company. Still, since Google spiders all pages if your web site even if you submit just index page, you can play around with titles of other pages. Just make sure that from every page, there is a link to you main page, and link should be attractive enough.
6. A compelling signature that accompanies your e-mail messages many times generates useful visits. It should constitute of a two-line, pithy description of your business, and link to your URL.
7. Although this I wouldn't suggest to people who have to pay for online time according to usage hours, you can look for various message boards and bulletin boards to spread word around about your business. Don't outright start your media blitzkrieg though. Introduce yourself first, participate in various discussions and debates, and during on of interactions, you can tell about your business.
Amrit Hallan is a freelance web developer based in New Delhi, India. He also publishes an ezine for web developers by the name of BYTESWORTH REACHOUT and you can subscribe at mailto:bytesworth-subscribe@topica.com. To know more about his work, you can visit http://www.bytesworth.com