Building website traffic - think beyond meta tags!

For many small business site owners, the goal of reaching the Top 10 search results for your favoured keyword phrases usually starts and ends with meta tag optimisation, and reciprocal link building.

Of course, the more competitive your business area is on the web, the harder it will be to conquer the first page of Google.

There are some simple things you can do with this primary area of web marketing - going for keyword phrases rather than single words, providing good "anchor" text for those links back to your site, and also exchanging links with sites in a similar business area to you.

You can read more about web marketing basics here.

However, optimising your web site code is just one part of the battle to gaining (and keeping) visitors. There are a number of onsite and offsite activities we'd highly recommend looking at if you want to increase your website traffic.

1) Writing articles to publicise your small business site.

One of the best ways to attract visitors to your site is by providing related sites with quality editorial relating to your subject area. Not only will this give you a chance to promote your service or business, but it can also indirectly aid your search engine promotion efforts via link popularity.

You may well gain new visitors on the back of your articles submitted to other sites, but you're also likely to have the article linked to that site for some time which could help with your own site's page rank. This is an added bonus of article submission.

The key to promoting your website using articles is in the win-win situation between the author and the publisher. Both sides need to benefit. The article must be well researched, relevant and readable. In return, you should get some traffic from the link in the article, and once Google & co. index the article, you'll have a new backlink to your own site which will aid your link popularity. The more articles and sites you publish to, the more links you'll get back, and your site's reputation will be enhanced by the editorial you have written.

• Read our dedicated article on writing content to promote your site.

You may well have mastered the art of search engine optimisation, but are your site visitors impressed with what they see when they arrive at your site?

It's no good having a creative, individual website with brilliant, informative copy if customers can't find you on the internet.

On the other hand, it's also detrimental if you have a website that can be easily found (has a high ranking) but people become bored and alienated reading it.

Producing effective online copywriting is a creative process blending art and science in a balanced technique combining many different elements. This integration of disciplines is required to satisfy both the technical and the aesthetic objectives of a website.

• Read our dedicated article on website copywriting.

As visitors arrive at your site, regardless of the entry page, the first question in their minds is, "Am I in the right place? Will I find what I want here? Can I achieve what I want to achieve here?"

Fortunately, the web page format gives us a title, headlines, first paragraphs and subheads we can use. So it makes sense to use them to make it abundantly clear to our visitors what the page is about.

We’ll do this for our visitors. But, because doing so helps our visitors, Google will reward us.

• Read the Ultimate Web Writer's Style Guide.

If you avoid making a few crucial web design and promotion mistakes you'll get far more visitors to your small business website, and they'll keep coming back for more.

• Ten Website Marketing Mistakes to Avoid.