It might seem like a good idea to do whatever you can to attract visitors and hits to your website, but here are five methods you should avoid. That’s because each of them is annoying, counterproductive, or both:

Using pay per click advertising without doing the math. Ever since search companies first figured out they could make money off businesses competing for the top spots, marketers have been tripping over themselves to bid for online traffic. Some of the most popular keywords can cost you $5, $10 or more for single click, so be careful about spending a fortune on generic words and phrases that might not be worth the cash.
Junk articles. Posting a bunch of keyword-stuffed gibberish to your website doesn’t do anyone any good. For one thing, search engines have caught on and aren’t likely to reward you with a good ranking. If you’re reading this page, it’s very likely because one of Google’s spiders found it for you. Trying to outwit the web’s most thorough readers is never a winning strategy, and at the same time, visitors to your site are going to be turned off by sloppy writing.
Link farms. In the same way, numerous search engine companies offer thousands of links for a small fee, supposedly helping you reach the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Unfortunately, having thousands of adult sites, shady online casinos, and pages that exist only to link to other unknown domains can only have one effect on your search engine rankings, and it’s not a good one.
Pop up ads. It should go without saying that employing these kinds of tactics is a bad idea; after all, if people are annoyed with you, how likely are they to buy from you? Still, I see marketers try to get away with this all the time. It doesn’t work, so don’t waste the money.
Obnoxious designs. Like the man at the singles bar who wears a suit that looks like it’s been made from an imitation cheetah, some business owners broadcast that they are out of ideas with really obnoxious “strange” design choices. Being different isn’t always a great way to attract customers, and if you are not careful … it’s more likely to backfire by driving visitors away.

It’s almost written in stone that more traffic and better search rankings are good for small businesses online. But as you look to enhance your Internet marketing efforts, stay with the tried and true methods and avoid these pitfalls. Not every visitor to your site is a good one, and most options that look like an easy way to get customers are a waste of time.

Should you add web designer to your list of unofficial titles?

After more than 10 years of working in web design in Indianapolis, I would say you absolutely should not. The biggest reason, of course, has to do with quality; a homemade website can be spotted almost immediately. Unless you have a very strong background in design and coding, the endless hours you’re going to spend getting your site up and running aren’t going to amount to a professional-looking end product.

Don’t think it’s only designers who will notice. You might not worry about impressing me, but what about your customers and prospects? Every potential buyer who visits your site and comes away less than impressed represents a missed opportunity – and more to the point, a sale that wasn’t made. Even if you’re only getting a small number of visitors each week, those missing orders can add up very, very quickly.

Functionality can also be an issue. A good web designer can add video, contact forms, and e-commerce features to your new site that can help you make, or save, thousands of dollars each year. Most do it yourself versions, however, are akin to online brochures. That’s sometimes better than not having anything at all, but it won’t do much in the way of generating leads and orders, saving you customer service time, or helping your company’s search engine rankings.

And then there’s that time we mentioned. It can easily take someone who isn’t a professional web designer well over 30 or 40 hours to put together a functioning website, even if they start from a predefined template – something I don’t recommend, by the way – and at least that long again the first time something goes wrong. The dollar value of those lost hours is usually bigger than it looks, when you consider what could have been accomplished in that time.

What all of this really comes down to is a concept that every successful business owner knows, but is all too easy to forget from time to time: the difference between prices and costs. While it’s true that a professional-grade website can require a sizable investment, it’s very likely to pay for itself time and time again. As tempting as it can be to buy a piece of software, crack open a couple of books, and try to design your company’s new website, I advise you to resist the urge. You might save a little bit of money today, but you’ll only be taking it out of your own pocket later.

Because of the enormous bottom-line implications that come with a top listing on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, SEO has become a major industry in and of itself. Dozens of books have been written, thousands of websites are devoted to the topic, and hundreds more web design professionals like myself work at it every day of the week, so I can understand if you’re a little bit confused about my suggestion to just toss that part of your online marketing strategy aside.

Before you go thinking I’ve lost my marbles, however, let me explain: SEO is important, and you should do everything you can to cover the basics on your site. If you haven’t gotten a professional to optimize your page headers, tags, and other major details, get started on that today. Beyond that, though, it’s a good idea to forget about the search engine spiders for a while. Why? Because so many marketers and business owners become obsessed with having the right keywords scattered throughout their pages that they start to miss the point – getting paying customers to visit your website and stay there.

Automated computer programs don’t buy goods or services, people do. So when you’re putting together your product descriptions, company profiles, or online articles, do the smart thing and write to another person. Don’t let the temptation to worry about “keyword density” or “long tail search parameters” destroy what you wanted to say; just make your point in normal, everyday language.

For one thing, this will probably end up improving your actual search performance. Because so many marketers and dubious search engine “experts” try to fool the system, Google and other engines will actually punish you if they think your writing is designed to increase traffic.

More to the point, though, good old human-to-human communication remains the best way to sell. All the traffic in the world doesn’t mean anything if the people who come to your website immediately leave, and the only way they’re going to stay is if they find something that’s interesting and/or informative. There might be dozens of ways to attract automated spiders, but no one has come up with a better way to hold a person’s attention than by simply writing about what matters to them.

It might sound silly to remind you about how important search engine optimization is, and then tell you not to worry about it so much in the next breath. But the fact the matter is the best SEO comes naturally. If you simply concentrate on adding solid content to your site regularly, you’re sure to gain hundreds of new readers, automated and otherwise.

Once in a while, though, things aren’t quite that easy. For instance, even though they sound a bit close and both concern stars and planets, a person who signed up for a course on astronomy and ended up learning about astrology would be disappointed. I mention this because it’s not uncommon to hear clients refer to graphic designers and web designers as basically the same thing.

Is there a difference? And does it matter? You bet it does! While it’s true that both graphic designers and web designers are artistic professionals that can make your marketing materials pop, there is a degree of specialty to each. Traditionally, graphic designers work on print materials, like brochures, annual reports, and magazine advertisements. Web designers, on the other hand, spend as much time working with code as we do images – we worry about CSS, screen sizes, and HTML tags rather than paper stock or ink variations.

That extra bit of specialty can be more important than you might think. That’s because a profitable small business website isn’t just a pretty picture – it’s a piece of online art backed by some kind of coding. It needs to function perfectly for a variety of people using more than a dozen computer platforms and Internet browsers. Getting ink to look great on the page isn’t easy, but pulling the same colors and images out of a thousand different laptops and monitors at the same time is a whole different kind of challenge.

For that reason, you need to be careful hiring graphic designers without any coding experience to lay out your site. There definitely are talented web professionals working at firms that do print work, but the skills aren’t interchangeable. Working with websites requires a different set of skills, knowledge, and even software to make sure that what you see on the screen is going to translate properly into a working site. Sometimes these differences aren’t easy to spot at first glance. That’s because a client’s initial look at their new website is usually in the form of an image mockup. Since the image doesn’t really have to do anything, it can be made to look like a million with programs like Photoshop, even if the designer doesn’t have the background to transform that picture into a working model using HTML and CSS.

Graphic design and web design sound close, but they’re not the same thing and knowing the difference is important. Any artist can give you something that looks nice, but a professional web designer can make or break your online business.

This phrase isn’t only well known to parents; those of us who work with search engine optimization hear different versions of it quite a bit. That’s because SEO is like physical exercise – everybody wants to see results today, but few of us have the discipline to work out consistently for months on end.

So, like technological personal trainers, web designers constantly strive to motivate clients to keep up their crunches and push-ups, usually in the form of fresh content and site updates. All the while, though, the question keeps coming at us: why does this have to take so long?

The short answer has to do with software. Simply put, Google and the other search engines use millions of tiny, automated programs that scour the Internet day and night looking for words and phrases that match what searchers type in. So, not only do you have to add new material to your website, but you also have to wait for one of these “spiders” to find and index the new pages before they can have any effect. On top of that, most engines place more weight on older sites and those that regularly update, meaning that there’s always a bit of a lag and that consistency – not just volume – figure in overtime.

For a longer and more complete answer, though, we have to think a bit about what matters to searchers in the first place. What people are looking for isn’t keywords – it’s answers and information that help them solve life’s problems. To build up stock of that information takes time and attention; you can’t simply throw together a few words and expect that readers are going to respond.

Additionally, the specific phrases and ideas that people care about (or that you want to offer) change pretty frequently. What was hot last month isn’t such a big deal today. In order to stay at the front of the search listings, business owners need to anticipate these trends, or at least keep up with them. Otherwise, you can quickly find that traffic to your site falls off a cliff once a new product, idea, or innovation takes hold. It takes a steady stream of fresh content to stay ahead of the pack, and you’d better believe that there are always a handful of new businesses chasing you.

Remember, search engine optimization is a bit like starting a spin class – it’s going to take a little bit of time to get the results you want, but not nearly as long as you’d think. As long as you can stick to a routine of adding fresh, quality content and updates at regular intervals, you’ll stop wondering why SEO takes so long, and start marveling at how it works so well.

So, after a great amount of personal reflection and internal debate, I have decided to spill the beans. Here, after all these years, is the secret to getting great SEO results quickly: First, you make a sweep of your small business website, being sure to optimize all of the basics like page titles, embedded tags, and other technical details. Then, you generate a lot of high-quality, keyword-rich content and post it to your site and blog regularly. And finally, you work tirelessly to generate dozens, or even hundreds, of inbound links to your site from other reputable, well-known sources.

Once you’ve completed all that, all you have to do is keep doing all of the above until it slowly but surely works.

“Wait,” I can hear you saying, “that doesn’t sound all that fast at all… In fact, it doesn’t even sound like that much of a secret.” Well, you’ve got me there. But unfortunately, those are the steps that you – or any other business owner – has to take if you’re going to be assured of climbing up the search engine rankings. There are no shortcuts, and there is no magic bullet. You can spend a small fortune with dozens of gurus and experts, but it’s always going to come back to time and effort. The best that I or anyone else can do for you is to find the right keywords, keep you on schedule, and do what we can to stop the process from becoming any longer or more tedious than it already is.

Naturally, this advice comes as quite a disappointment to many business owners – especially those who have recently launched online businesses. Some of them refuse to believe it all, which leads them to write very big checks to people with questionable credentials. That’s not to say that there aren’t some great SEO professionals out there, because there certainly are. But for 95% of the small businesses jockeying for position on the major search engines, the best course of action is to get started and keep moving forward. Sooner or later, the rest will take care of itself.

Improved search engine rankings can be a huge boost to your business, bringing you hundreds or thousands of new leads and customers every year. But to enjoy those benefits, you’re going to need some knowledgeable assistance and a healthy amount of patience. There is no search engine magic bullet to speed up the process, but if you take the time to do it the right way, the results are worth the wait.

The failure of DIY websites

We live in a world of knockoffs. For every designer watch, handbag, or electronic gadget you could have your eye on, there are probably three others that look similar from a distance, but turn out to be cheap imitations once you’re holding them in your hands. That’s the same way I feel about small business do-it-yourself website “designs.”

Once the Internet started changing the way small businesses found and worked with customers, it didn’t take long for software and hosting companies to realize they could cash in on the trend. A good designer or creative team doesn’t come cheap, and they sensed eager entrepreneurs might be looking for ways to cut costs while taking their ventures online. And so, one after another, they started mass producing web designs – offering predesigned packages that could supposedly be used to make professional-looking sites within minutes, and at a fraction of the normal cost.

Soon, others started getting in on the act. Do-it-yourself website designs became a standard feature included with dozens of hosting packages and software suites. I’ve seen “ready-made” layouts offered inside productivity bundles, word processors, and even accounting software. The idea remains simple: fill in your information where it’s needed and you can have a custom website in a matter of minutes. It’s hard to find fault with this system, because it seems like everybody wins: the software company puts a few extra dollars on the balance sheet, and the customer saves some hard-earned cash.

And really, it would all be fantastic, if it weren’t for the results.

As you may already know if you’ve tried one, 99.5% of the ready-made, fill-in designs are terrible. I don’t just mean that they’re bad… I mean that they look like third grade computer science projects. From frames that don’t load correctly to colors that haven’t been in vogue since “elephant leg” jeans, they represent the exact opposite of what you want a customer to think about your business.

The biggest drawback to a “fill-in-the-blanks”, though, is that it hasn’t been designed for you. There are always going to be certain features, pages, or details that don’t quite do as much as you need them to, and others that are useless to your business. By attempting to come up with layouts that will work for anyone, in just about any industry, these companies are asking you to miss the forest for the trees. Sure, the do-it-yourself software is going to be easy from some to use – but most things that don’t stand any chance of making you money are.

Do it yourself website designs sound like a good idea in theory, and are kinder to your wallet. But if you’re serious about reaching your business goals, invest in an expert web designer who can create a layout that looks and performs the way it should.

To leverage your Facebook page to your advantage, though, you’re going to need to manage it the right way and avoid the most common pitfalls. Here are a few tips for using Facebook and other social networking sites to your advantage:

Act like a professional. Your Facebook page isn’t the place to post a detailed account of your drinking marathon, or rant about something that might offend one of your customers or colleagues. A surprising number of people forget that they’ve “friended” so many of their clients, and that each of their updates or ideas is going out to the men and women they do business with. What’s more, lots of the information on these sites is picked up by search engines, meaning that it could be nearly instantly accessible to someone who hasn’t even bought from you yet.

Be careful with photos and other media. A picture truly is worth a thousand words… or maybe tens of thousands of dollars if your best customer sees you doing something that doesn’t portray you in a good light. You don’t have to run every family vacation snapshot past a PR expert, but be careful about the photos and videos you share.

Keep private things private. In the same way, it’s a bad idea to talk about one of your clients personal or business details online. If you have any doubt whatsoever about whether they would want the information shared, then keep it to yourself.

Let your hair down. That doesn’t mean you have to be all business, though. One of the great things about social networking sites is that they allow you to share your personal side with the people who know you from a business setting. There’s nothing wrong with letting your customers know that you enjoyed a weekend away with your spouse, or that you just got a new puppy – these kind of details can strengthen your relationships with them, but use your better judgment.

Network. Online, it’s pretty easy to see who your clients are affiliated with, and it’s usually as easy as a quick e-mail to get an introduction. Treat Facebook and other social networking sites the same way you would any other professional networking setting – look for connections, but don’t be pushy about it.

Facebook might be a lot of fun, but it’s an also important business tool. That doesn’t mean you have to be thinking about sales and profits every time you log on, but you should probably remember that anything you say or post has the potential to be read by a client or prospect.

If we could narrow the wishes of every web design client in the world down to just two things, I suspect they would come out like this: they wish their website would be finished faster, and that their projects could cost less.

Both of those make perfect sense. Once a manager or business owner has decided to upgrade their site, or start a new one from the ground up, they are usually eager to get it done. And what company doesn’t like to save money? The expense of a new design can have a big effect bottom line – especially in this economy.

But what most clients don’t understand is that, while quality work is always going to take a little longer and require a more serious investment than something that’s poorly done, there are actually several things they can do to cut the time and lower the expense of their new website design. Here are a handful to get you started:

Know what you need. What features or functions will your new site have to have? What kind of look are you aiming for? Who will your visitors be? Knowing the answers to these questions gives you a strong starting point for your website design. In fact, I’d venture that the biggest time-waster in most clients’ projects stems from helping them figure out the basics of what they really need – issues they probably could have considered before we got started.

Supply pictures and content. Having the “raw materials” you’ll need for your website on hand – the photos, company history, logo files, etc. – can save your designer from having to track them down (or worse, re-create them from scratch) later. Naturally, this leads to fewer headaches, not to mention billable hours.

Appoint a contact. Who should your designer call or e-mail if they have a question? Having one person be the internal point of contact on your web design project can prevent dozens of smaller hassles. Ideally, it should be someone who knows where to find answers and information your company, and is in the office regularly. Whether they are in admin, management, or some other department isn’t important; that they can be reached and respond quickly is.

Give clear feedback. When you get a first look at your new design, try to give more insight than a simple thumb up or down. Specific feedback about the colors, tones, layout of the page, etc, if given early in the process, can cut off confusion (and expensive edits) down the road. Don’t be afraid to take a day or two and see how your new layout looks to you after you’ve slept on it. It’s a big decision, and one that costs a lot less time and money if you get it right the first time.

Stick to the plan. In the same way, try not to be too distracted by all of the things you’re new website could do, and focus on all of the things you decided it should do. It’s easy, once you’re in the middle of the process, to decide you want that two-minute video after all, or that your pages should all have rotating images. It’s also expensive and time-consuming. Remember the old proverb about an ounce of planning, and try to make decisions you can commit to at the start.

Hiring a designer or team to build your new website is probably never going to be as quick or inexpensive as you’d like. But keep these tips in mind, and you’ll burn a lot less time and money than most of your colleagues and competitors would.