A long time ago, it was pretty easy to get noticed on the Internet. All you had to do was put a few lines of code on your web site’s home page meta tags, and let the search engines do the rest for you. Now it’s a whole different story, and there are more new ways being generated every day… as old ones are phased out almost as quickly. Is it even worth it? Of course, letting toptenwholesale.com and its network of sites manufacturer.com, wholesaleu.com, offpricenetwork.com help buyers to connect directly with the wholesaler or manufacturer of choice is an easy option, but there’s a few things you can do for yourself too. I’m going to give you a few ideas that don’t require a degree in Computer Science to implement, that will perhaps help you gain visibility in a sea that is awash in technological mysteries.

Let’s take spiders, for instance. Spiders are not always a welcome sight, but in the world of Internet marketing they are indispensable. These “spiders” are the little pieces of code that is often referred to as a bot, or a software agent. Sounds like I’ve been watching the MATRIX too many times, eh? The job of the web spider is to crawl around and find information. This can be a simple one-line affair, or more usually a complex set of variables and instructions that are designed to work within the parameters of an environment that is constantly being modified, upgraded, and sometimes corrupted. It also takes a bit of know-how to craft one of these little bots, and to send it off on its way, without wasting your valuable time… or returning with nothing useful.

You don’t need to write code. You don’t even need to know much more than the usual routine of checking email, browsing sites, or using an online form. Some of the best things you can do to drive traffic to your site is to simplify your strategy, focus on the goals, and follow through consistently. If you’ve spent any time doing sales (which I suspect many of you have) then you know all about the 30-second commercial, the value of organizational skills, and the power of relationships. Here then, is a TopTen list of things you should consider when looking at the real basic methods for driving traffic to your site:

• Branding is not just coming up with a cute logo and a clever name, but it means you should design a look and feel for your site as well. Choose a color and style that you like, and stick with it. Tie it all together through your online presence, printed materials, and promotional goodies. Bring the virtual and physical together on your terms, and people will come to associate these subtle themes with your business.

• Make sure the customer can trust you. Build policies into your business that don’t confuse consumers or leave them with a bad taste in their mouths… and remember to look at everything you do from their perspective first.

• Be creative with the added values on your site. Offer things that the customer will appreciate, like industry related links, recommended reading, or just galleries of fun pictures from the latest trade show or wholesaler event. These things don’t cost you much, and they will add to the time your customer spends on your site… as well as adding to the usefulness of it, too.

• Include the ability to recommend your site to others. This can be as simple as putting a button on your page that lets the user submit an email or subscribe to a newsletter.

• Pay attention to the changes. Google is pretty good about keeping a cap on things, and that means you should keep your site up to spec, in order to avoid getting penalized for putting one line too many in your header text, or making a meta tag that upsets some part of the analytics. Keyword placement can be an issue too, so find out what you need to know, and keep looking it up to stay ahead of the curve.

• Advertise your site when it launches, and keep in touch with anyone who comments on it. Word of mouth is still a great way to generate leads and sales, so make sure you’re staying in front of people by reminding them about your site and services.

• Create a piece of material – like an article or news piece – that is targeted specifically to your customer… and then put it on your site! Give it to them, because they won’t be asking for it. Also, it would help if you made an effort to pass it around, by offering it to readers with reprint permission. This is a great way to find your work in some unexpected places.

• Use your web address for everything! Put it on your business cards, printed literature, T-shirts… everything and everywhere is best. Don’t be shy about it, since directing eyes to your site is numero uno in this game.

• Join other sites that have chat rooms and discussion boards, in order to become more familiar to those in the business. It might take some time and effort, but you’ll end up becoming well-known in some circles, even if they’ve never met you! Of course a signature line with your company’s site address is a good idea… and try not to be too assertive with the self-promotion. Moderators on discussion forums love to zap anyone who comes around just to cheer about their own business without leaving anything useful for the other members to discuss.

• This one sounds silly, but… visit your own site regularly, and check the links to make sure they’re okay. You’d be surprised how mahy dead links and error pages come up as your site grows and changes, and this is not the message you want to send out to those customers who have no time for figuring out why they got a 404 error when they just wanted to see your online catalog.

As you can see, there is a lot you can do without getting too technical, or without having to jump onto viral campaigns to boost your site’s visibility. For more specific and targeted strategies, be sure to contact the people at toptenwholesale.com for information on how you can use the power of heavy-hitting SEO to bring your site to the forefront. There’s a lot you can do, but the only thing you want your customers to do is Find it. Source it. Profit! From you, that is.

Plenty of information. As someone wisely pointed out to me once upon a time: “Everything you put on the Internet exists somewhere, even if you don’t see it anymore.” Scary stuff indeed.

To put it simply, much of it can used to drive your sales in the right direction, if you know the answers to the five ‘W’ questions, and us them to track your website performance…

• Who is checking out your site right now? Who visits most often, and browses the contents of your online catalogs, but never buys? Don’t you want to know which customers are using your FAQ page, then heading straight into the order form? This kind of information can help you better service the people that are currently working with your site… and tailor the rest of it to suit the ones that seem interested, but not fully compelled to follow through.

• What are visitors looking at, anyway? Do you really know which parts of your site get the most traffic, and which components are getting the most clicks?

• Where does your site show up on the Internet, anyway? You might be surprised to see some blogs and other sites that have linked your site in reference to a story, article, or random post. On top of that, you’ll probably find a few reasons to work out a deal with some sites that you’d love to have a link posted on, which will direct traffic back to your site very easily.

• When do visitors frequent your site? Are there particular times of the day, month, or even year that seem to get the most activity? This goes beyond the simple logic of holiday season peak traffic, but maybe there are some connections to other events on the calendar that tie in very nicely with your site’s offerings. Once you’ve identified these trends, it could be easier to position yourself for some higher visibility during the times that count most.

• Why are consumers even looking at your site, anyway? True, you’ve spent some money and worked out some deals with partners and affiliates to promote your property, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg… consumer buying habits can be tricky to nail down, and chasing down the answer to the ever-elusive why can put you in the lead. It may also expose some flaws in your system, and help you to answer the other logical question: why not?

One major thing to consider is the rise of the vertical search market on the Internet. Companies like our very own Toptenwholesale.com specialize in narrowing the spectrum of search, to give seekers of industry-specific information the tools they need to find more relevant results with fewer clicks. While search giants like Google are doing an amazing job of bringing information to everyone, they almost do it too well, and a simple search for a text query will turn up thousands of results. Who’s got that kind of time? Fewer clicks - in terms of buyers looking for sources - means the difference between somebody choosing you… or your competition! It also means that you’ll get answers to questions that are heavy on the wholesale, and lighter on the other stuff that doesn’t apply to your business. All of this will work towards your goal to Find it. Source it. Profit!

I’m going to assume that you already know the basics of SEO… in fact, you’re probably implementing a number of advanced schemes already, as the holiday season approaches and makes those elusive clicks even more important than they are at just about any other time of year. However, there are a few things you could do to make your site a little more SEO-friendly, to direct that crucial traffic where you want it to land. Here’s a TopTen list of SEO ideas that will help you to clean up and streamline your site, just in time for the fearsome 2009 holiday season:

• Time to reorganize, and get the place ready for party-time… after all, don’t you clean up and straighten out your home whenever you plan to entertain guests? Your site is an extension of your space, and whether it’s real or virtual… it’s got to have a new look for the occasion. On top of that, customers have different shopping habits right now than they do at any other time of the year. Liven up your site, and make it reflect the good times! This doesn’t mean you have to scrap your existing page code, but maybe just hook it up with keyword-rich anchor text over additional links that will pass page-rank to your most popular holiday categories and products. In addition, you can take measures to cut out the excess links by putting a link on your home page that sends visitors where they need to be, in one click instead of three or four.

• Crank up the PPC… sounds like some kind of futuristic weapon from a sci-fi movie, doesn’t it? Pay-per-click advertising is good for advertisers who pay their host only when their ad is clicked… and even better for the rankings! This is crunch time, and there isn’t a lot of wiggle room on the calendar for companies who haven’t figured out that increasing your PPC adverts will also produce more traffic to your site. Customers will be clicking whether you put up an ad or not, so why not increase the chance that they’ll be directed to your site? Check out TopTenwholesale.com for  PPC Ad opportunities.

• Offer additional information that is useful and fun… a highly effective technique is to write an article or blog post on a specific product or service, because straight content ranks well in search engines and, as you probably know, content is everything for SEO. Get started and post a blog or comment on TopTenWholesale.com community blog.

• Banner ads are good… sounds too simple to be included in this list, but it’s amazing how many companies forget this one. Back in the day, it used to be quite typical for magazine and newspaper adverts to skyrocket during the holiday season… now it’s the online version that’s getting all the attention. Put yourself in front of the customer by getting a banner ad out there. Toptenwholesale.com has a wide range of online banner ads that will get you in front of targeted buyer groups ready to purchase.

• Meta tags and updates are small, but powerful… make sure that the most important key words you are targeting are listed in the beginning of the meta title! Since your title tags are probably structured by category, make sure they are ordered in importance. Since you’re promoting holiday goods and prices, don’t forget to dial-in your meta descriptions so that customers will quickly recognize the keywords they’re looking for. As the clock runs out, frantic shoppers will only be looking for the search responses that speak directly to them. Everything else is just noise.

• Keep it simple… because quite frankly, the law of averages don’t care if your site is amazing… or a lifeless pile of HTML. Most of the clicks you actually do get will not lead to anything substantial, and that’s a fact. A good rule of thumb is to keep 80% of your link authority (page-rank) coming from 20% of your back links, which means that you should focus on building more of those strategic links that deliver more of your link authority. This is definitely not the time to try something big and crazy, but rather a time to use what already works… find the sites that have a nice stream of traffic, and see if you can’t get some of your content posted up there, for a mere link to your site as the payback. Bartering can be good for both of you, and it will crank up your traffic if you make friends with a high-ranking site!

• Clean the place up… especially if you haven’t been doing it all year. Dead links, bad graphics files, and other detritus from the past can cause link splits and dead-end search results that don’t help you in the least. Simply cleaning up your internal linking structure can result in a higher ranking.

• Don’t fear the audit… unless it’s the IRS at your front door! Seriously though, this is a good time to think about doing an overall assessment of your site’s ups and downs, and a time to take inventory of what is being used, and what’s not so useful anymore. Some sites are possibly under the annual code freeze right now, but you can still  check basics like your customer contact form, live chat/customer service scripts, or other mechanisms that are in place. Go over the last few months of log files and site analytics, especially to turn up any 404 errors and other missing files.

• It’s better to give than to receive… gifts, that is. Create some pages on your site that will promote the word “free” to your visitors… since everybody loves free stuff, right? This will be a tremendous boot to your page rankings, as long as you’re promoting the freebies actively.

• Don’t forget the real world… If you live and breathe SEO, offline may be the furthest thing from your mind. Of course, there are other angles to the offline world. Hopefully you have the basic fundamentals covered, like making sure that your web address appears in all your mailings, advertisements, and anywhere else you may be marketing offline. If you have brick-and-mortar locations, it doesn’t hurt to remind people that you also have a website. Don’t forget that many of the traditional offline entities now have online presences themselves. TV news, radio stations, and newspaper reporters are often looking for interesting holiday stories, from the “most unusual” gift ideas to how to entertain for the holidays. Come up with an interesting story idea and you may not only get valuable airtime or print mention, but a link from their site to yours. Separate out, into “buckets,” those purchases that happened offline (e.g. phone orders) but that resulted from online marketing (i.e. were generated from natural search, from paid search, from print, etc.). You could even go more granular, beyond the referral source, and associate actual keywords (search terms) with these referral sources.

Sounds like a lot of stuff to do? Well, it is. Let the SEO experts at Toptenwholesale.com help you out with some of that tedious computer geek stuff, while you spend your time on any of the other hundreds of tasks that require your attention! Contact us by email for details at sales@toptenwholesale.com, and we’ll give you the straight answers to making your company’s SEO goals a reality. After all, we’re already helping thousands to Find it. Source it. Profit!