Do you rely on prospects typing in your website address to find you, perhaps from a business card or printed material that you distribute? If so, you are forfeiting a lot of search engine traffic if your website strategy relies solely on type-ins. There are reasons your site isn't attracting traffic from Google. It's because you don't have a strategy for getting your site ranked well by the search engines.

Type-in traffic strategy

You may be one who chose your domain name purely to reflect your corporate or personal identity. This is a strategy that mostly relies on type-in traffic from people reading your advertisements or other marketing materials and typing in www.CompanyName.com or www.YourName.com to find you.

While there is a lot to be said for the brandability of this approach, keep in mind it's not the only alternative you have. If you are relying only on type-in traffic (or people looking specifically for you on Google), then you're probably leaving a lot of leads on the table by ignoring the search engine traffic strategy. Let's face it—most people aren't looking for you. They are looking for a service. It's your job to be found by being where they're searching.

The old rules of choosing short dot com domains with no dashes still apply to a type-in traffic strategy. You're wanting people to remember the name of your site. You want them to go home and type it in, so you don't want to have a website that looks like www.my-best-keywords.biz. When you give out that web address on the phone, prospective clients will probably not put the dashes in the right places, and will probably type in dot com rather than dot biz.

But if you are only targeting type-in traffic up to this point, let me introduce another approach to you. It pays to complement your existing strategy with a search engine traffic strategy.

Search engine traffic strategy

Like any project, it's important to pick the right tools for the job. If you're expecting to capture search engine traffic with a type-in traffic strategy, that's probably why your website traffic expectations aren't being met. Being on the web is not the same as being visible on the web. There's a lot of competition out there for website traffic, and if you want it from the search engines, you are going to need to invest in.

One thing to remember is that a domain that targets search engine traffic doesn't have the restriction of needing to be short, free of dashes, dot com, and memorable. What's most important is the keyword value of the domain (along with the search engine friendly design of the site, of course). I don't want to overstate the value of the domain in the equation—it's certainly possible to capture high search engine traffic with a domain that reflects purely a corporate identity. It's just that, all things being equal, Google will tend to value the domain with targeted keywords over one that doesn't have them. Given equally designed sites with equal content, www.idaho-mls-listings.com (a site I'm developing, by the way) is considered to be more relevant to searches for Idaho MLS listings than www.mycorporateidentity.com. (Idaho MLS Listings is not high on search results yet, because it's brand new and that takes time. But it will be.)

My point is simply that if you're out to capture search engine traffic, you don't need the best and shortest dot com. www.my-city-mortages.com or www.city-real-estate-listings.info do just fine. You can always link them back to your main site if you choose a blended approach.

Search engine friendly design (SEF design)

It is appalling to me how many boiler plate real estate websites are nearly invisible to search engines. They are notoriously lacking in basic search engine friendly design features like pure HTML navigation, rather than Javascript or Flash, which are nearly invisible to search engines. They are also notorious for leaving out unique, keyword-rich, useful content in favor of boiler plate filler articles. If this is your situation, please call me to discuss how I can rescue your site from boiler plate obscurity! (208) 249-8893

I will write more on this later, as this is a topic that could get quite lengthy. But if your site is not capturing traffic from your target market on the search engines, it's probably because you are relying too much on type-in traffic. You need to either broaden your strategy on your existing site to better target search engine traffic, or add a search engine friendly website into your marketing repertoire for a blended approach.

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