Five top tips that will boost your traffic

1. Sign up to a voucher code site

Sign your business up to a voucher code website, such as www.myvouchercodes.co.uk. These sites list money-saving promotional codes and discount vouchers on various brands. These codes are then tracked. For each successful sale, you pay commission. “If you do advertise this way, add ‘voucher code’ to your keywords to try and bring some of the searches direct to your website without having to pay commission to a third party,” advises Guy Levine, who runs Manchester-based Return On Digital.

2. Set up a Facebook page

If your business isn’t on Facebook, you’re missing out on a big chunk of web traffic. US bakery Sprinkles updates its Facebook page every day with details on what it’s baking. It also includes a special password. If you “whisper” it in one of the stores, you get a free cupcake. Genius. It now has more than 130,000 fans on Facebook and credits it as the single most important reason why the business is growing.

3. Get rid of duplicate domains

Having both a .com and a .co.uk website is a big mistake. Having both www. and non-www. sub-domains active won’t do you any favours, either. Search engines will view these as completely different websites and, if the content is the same on each, this can cause split link strength and damage your natural visibility. Get merging.

4. Tweet

Twitter etiquette dictates that you don’t plug your own website too often – but people will visit out of curiosity if they enjoy your posts. Buying agent Tracy Kellett of BDI Home Finders (@buyingagent) has nearly 1,000 followers and a Twitter influence score (measured at klout.com) to equal Stephen Fry. Since she started Tweeting in November 2009, visits to her website www.bdihomefinders.co.uk have more than doubled.

5. Make sure your web pages load quickly

If your site has pages with lots of images and animations that take a while to load, be warned: Google recently announced that it will take page-load time into account when it ranks websites. Use Firebug to check how long it takes each element of a page to load: getfirebug.com.

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