There are over one billion internet users, according to internetworldstats.com, making a Web presence a must-have for most organisations, if only as a component of their marketing strategy. Most directors of European businesses are fully aware of the Web's power, which is why you can no longer simply upload a few pages, sit back and wait for visitors to come and find you. With over 21 billion Web pages available to surfers, competition is so fierce that firms are starting to spend more to increase Web traffic.

According to the recent UK Search Engine Marketing Report from e-commerce specialist E-consultancy.com and search engine marketing agency Neutralize, 56 per cent of the 700 internet companies surveyed said their companies spend more than £10,000 annually on paid search (for example, pay-per-click advertising used on websites and search engines where advertisers only pay when a user clicks on an ad to visit their own website), while a quarter spend over £100,000. More than 60 per cent of companies said they would be increasing their spending in the next 12 months. But what if you cannot compete with such budgets? Four experts give their tips on how to increase Web traffic with minimum outlay.

Love at first site
Stephen Orr, founder of Web4Marketing, suggests starting small. "You should test your way to a better result rather than rushing in, spending lots of money and then finding you are wrong," he says. "The beauty of the Web is that you can do that at a low cost compared to other media."
According to Orr, many small companies put up a website based on the design of their brochure, only to find it doesn't work. "The design of the website has to reflect the fact that the customer is king," he explains. "You have a maximum of 10 seconds to give the customer the right impression or they'll disappear. Your home page needs to look like a poster—you need to describe the customer need first rather than explain what you do. Once you have them, they may delve further into your site, so they should be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily."

Dan Drury, director of sales and marketing at website consultancy Bowen Craggs, says: "You must have a site that's worth visiting. It should contain good information, look nice, have no spelling mistakes or broken links—otherwise visitors will leave immediately and won't come back." Bowen Craggs sends twice-weekly tips on what works and what doesn't on large corporate websites.

Hits and misses
According to Drury the best way to bring people to your site is via search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, which are used for the vast majority of UK searches. "Other search engines account for less than two per cent of searches but they are industry specific, so if you are a specialist business—say, a manufacturer of medical equipment—it might be worth finding out how you get included," says Drury. "You may have to pay a small fee but it should be worth it."

There are two ways to bring traffic to your site through search engines. The first is via search engine optimisation (SEO). "Search engines go around looking for websites and indexing them—so you want to make sure they put you in their directory," explains Drury. "The great thing is that it is completely free—all you need is someone to type in their search phrase—in other words, what it is they are looking for."

But it's not much good being in the directory unless you are top of the listings. A survey by the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US found that 85 per cent of internet traffic is driven by search engines—but that 75 per cent of users never look past the first page of results. "You need to be in the top 10," says Drury. "This is the objective of any website, but it's hard because everyone else wants to do the same. If, for example, you are a travel agent then you may as well forget it unless you have serious money. But if you are a niche player then you have a better chance."
 
Clicks of the trade
To make your site as search-engine friendly as possible, you need to be specific about your product, says Orr. "Then you have to think about the words customers will put into the search engine. Your website needs to reflect these words so that when the customer lands on your page, they know they have come to the right place."

Chris Lake, editor of E-consultancy.com, advises using specific, rather than broad, terms. "For example, instead of using 'mortgage', you should use 'first-time buyer mortgage'. You will get better conversions," he says.

The second way to attract traffic via search engines is through paid searches (also called sponsored listings and pay-per-click advertising). "This works like an auction," explains Drury. "So if I'll pay 50 pence for the phrase 'fishing tackle' and you'll pay 80 pence, then you'll be listed above me. Each time someone clicks on your listing you'd then pay 80 pence."

To set this up, you first need to create an account with the search engine of choice: AdWords (Google), adCenter (MSN) or Search Marketing (Yahoo). Next, you write a 35 word advert with a link to your website. Then you state your budget—you could say you want to spend £100 a month. "It is a great way of getting instant traffic," says Drury. "But again, the more general your business, the harder it is to get in—and it's hard to compete with the big boys who have large budgets for this."

Blogging on
"Blogs are a no-brainer for small businesses," says Lake. "But there is obviously some resource needed to maintain the blog." According to Lake, some businesses make the mistake of thinking they have nothing to say about themselves. "But you don't necessarily have to talk about your company," he says. "You can talk about the trends and issues in your industry—in fact, you should have a view on this."

Lake believes blogs are also a great way of creating silos of content that are key-word rich and help your site rank well in the search engines. "You need to think about SEO and getting key words into your blog," he says. "For example, if you want to rank top for car loans you need to set up your blogs to talk about car loans, and get the phrase into the headline."
Blogs give sites a freshness which attracts Googlebots. "These are 'crawlers' that record the frequency of your updates," explains Lake. "If your website is static, then Google sends its crawlers round less frequently, which is bad for SEO."

Measuring up
"A lot of people had a negative association with banner ads in the past," says Drury. "Now they are growing at a phenomenal rate. It is the most expensive thing you can do, but it's great for brand building." It's only for companies with a decent budget that are prepared to undertake a sustained marketing campaign.

It's also essential to measure online advertising to see if it's working. "Using a Web analytics product can tell you what is happening on your site," says Drury. "For example, it can tell you if users are clicking on ads and if they've bought anything or where they've come from. Was it from Yahoo? If not, it's probably not worth being listed there." And it needn't cost anything. "Google analytics is free," says Drury. "There is no need to buy Web analytics software—unless you want something very specific."

Likewise, registering visitors is a quick way to chart visitor numbers. "You don't want a visitor to come and go without leaving any contact details," says Orr. "You want their email address or phone number." He suggests leaving some of your best information off the site so that visitors make an enquiry—for example, getting them to register their email address in order to download a White Paper. "You may lose more visitors by asking them to do this but the ones you do get will be more easily converted," he explains. "You will also get useful information about your website—is it attracting the right people? Is the website doing what you want it to do? Working through this information is key to improving your site."

For a small fee you can also get yourself included in various directory listings. "Yahoo has a directory that is categorised like a Yellow Pages," says Drury. "Then there is the Yellow Pages itself, Yell.com and other business directories. If you are a member of the IoD or the British Chambers of Commerce then you can get a free entry on their websites. Get your site listed in as many places as possible."

Email bonding
Gather email addresses from existing customers, potential customers and contacts at trade shows. "You can also buy lists of email addresses in the same way you can buy lists for direct mail advertising—but the great thing about email marketing is it is cheaper and you can track results quite easily," notes Drury.

He suggests companies include a button on their website that invites people to sign up to email newsletters or e-bulletins. If you are going to send e-newsletters you need to commit to it, but there are ways of making the job less onerous. "If you have a newsletter offline, you can re-use that material," he says. "Don't say you'll do a regular e-newsletter and then not do it. E-newsletters are a good way of getting your message into people's inboxes but they need to be relevant and timely-they only work if well thought through."

Use your networks
This works by persuading other people who have websites to link to yours. "You may have to pay them some kind of reward for sending you traffic—or if those visitors buy anything," says Drury. "Which sites you link to will depend on the industry you are in. Amazon may ask a knitting website to advertise knitting books, for which it will give them a small fee in return."

Likewise, get users to put your name about: "Since the early days of internet marketing, communicating to your users and trying to incentivise them to promote your site has been a good strategy, and will continue to be so," says Edward Cowell, technical director at Neutralize. "Now it's evolving into a set of strategies under the 'social bookmarking' heading."

Adds Orr: "You should use phrases like, "Refer our site to a friend" and "Link to our website" and offer incentives for referrals—such as free e-books, reports, software and other information. You could also offer discounts on other products you sell."

"Anything that drives word of mouth is all good," says Lake. "We don't do any banner or print advertising. Our success is down to word-of-mouth and PR-online and offline," he says.

Drury adds: "And make sure you put your website on all your offline marketing material—print advertising, letterhead, marketing material—any company literature." Obvious perhaps, but it's a commonly overlooked element of the marketing mix.

2. Ten tips for reducing burgeoning IT costs

This year, Microsoft has spent millions trying to convince you to upgrade to Windows Vista and Office 2007. The makers of PCs, servers, and other hardware are following in the software giant's footsteps, hawking their own new equipment in the knowledge that when a company buys new software, it often ends up buying new machines as well.
Back in 1995, Harvard Business School professor James McKenney called computer costs an "insatiable economic sump" for businesses. He was right. From the time the first mainframes were installed in offices in the 1950s, companies have been pouring cash into information technology, much of it going to upgrade existing equipment and programmes. Today, more than 40 per cent of the average company's capital investment goes on IT, and routine expenses in this area swallow up the largest slice of the annual budget.
Sometimes, investments in IT pay off in higher profits but, most often, it is little more than a necessary evil. Companies boost IT expenditure to keep pace with competitors in the automation race, but they rarely get a competitive edge or an earnings boost from the outlay. IT is just another cost of doing business-and an onerous one at that.
The good news is that in the wake of the Y2K scare and the bursting of the dotcom bubble, companies have grown more skeptical about IT and more conservative in their spending. Microsoft faces a much tougher sell this year than it did in 2001 when it rolled out Windows XP. Since then exciting new technologies have also emerged that have allowed businesses to use their existing IT equipment more effectively and avoid buying
new gear.
Suddenly, companies are finding they can cut their IT budgets and still have the computing capabilities they need. Smart IT management is all about getting more for less. Here are 10 ways your business can achieve that goal.

1 Consolidate
More powerful microprocessors mean that a big gap has opened up between the computing capacity companies have in place and the capacity they need for their applications. Studies show that about 75 per cent of the power of the average corporate server is wasted. Data storage systems aren't much better, with capacity rarely more than 50 per cent utilised.
That opens up big opportunities to consolidate servers, databases, and even entire data centres. Large companies are leading the way. Hewlett-Packard's IT department, for example, is consolidating its 85 data centres down to just six and expects to save hundreds of millions of pounds as a result. But you don't have to be a giant corporation to make net gains. Adams Kids, the UK children's clothing retailer, went from running three servers to just one. In doing so, it reduced its maintenance and support costs, for both hardware and software, while also reducing the size of its data centre.
2 Virtualise
Closely related to consolidation is virtualisation. Simply put, it means replacing hardware with software. Since all modern computing gear, from microprocessors to databases to firewalls, operates through digital instructions, they can often be "emulated" with software code. You can, for instance, use a single server to run many "virtual machines", thus reducing hardware expenditure. Virtualisation is allowing insurance group Prudential UK to do with just two computers what once required 60 servers.
It's also possible to virtualise a company's PC desktops, running employees' applications centrally, on a shared server, rather than from individual hard drives. Dundee City Council has switched from installing applications on individual PCs to distributing them to users' computers over a network from a central server. By doing so, it estimates it will save £85,000 annually in support costs and £70,000 in software licence fees.
3 Go open source
Free open source software has proved its value in running the inner workings of computer systems. The Linux operating system and Apache Web server, for instance, play key roles in keeping internet traffic flowing smoothly. Many companies have found that open source operating systems are a cheaper alternative to proprietary ones sold by big vendors. Virgin Money switched to Linux to run its consumer-facing website. As a result, it not only avoided high software licensing costs but also found its site's performance improved substantially.
Open source is moving into the application world as well. Although open source applications won't be right for every company, they can be more simple and less expensive to run than proprietary programmes. Recruitment firm Reed chose an open source application, from Alfresco to manage documents throughout all its branch offices. It found the Alfresco application had the functions it required but was much easier to install and use than more complex content-management systems sold by traditional software firms.

 

4 Buy software as a
service

You may not need to buy or install software applications at all as the idea of "utility computing" finally moves from dream to reality. Broadband internet provides the powerful transmission grid required to supply software as a for-fee service rather than as a pricey packaged product. Hundreds of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, start-ups have been launched, and even computing giants like Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP are rolling out SaaS offerings. Buying software as a service not only allows you to avoid hefty up-front payments for licences, it also means you can avoid all the hardware and labour costs that go along with running it.
Foreign-exchange company Travelex went the SaaS route for the software it needs to manage its customer accounts. Its regional offices had been using a mix of customer relationship management (CRM) software, from simple Excel spreadsheets to complex Siebel enterprise applications. By standardising on Salesforce.com's CRM service, which only requires a Web browser to use, Travelex now has a single, central database of customer information, maintained on Salesforce's computers, and has also cut its maintenance and equipment expenses.
Smaller companies may soon be able to fulfill all their software needs over the internet. Google already offers corporate email, calendars, website hosting, blog hosting, and even spreadsheet and word-processing software as utility services. The days when small businesses had to run their own servers for email and other basic applications are rapidly coming to an end.
5 Buy hardware as a
service

Utility-computing isn't limited to software; you can also buy data storage and raw computing power as services supplied over the Web. Hardware as a service can be a boon where computing demands fluctuate substantially. In the past, a business would have to buy enough computing and storage capacity to meet its peak demand, which meant it was expensive.
One of the leading providers is online retailer Amazon.com, which has opened up its computing systems to outside companies. For a low, usage-based fee, these firms can store their data and run programs on Amazon's machines. SmugMug, a US photo-sharing website, uses Amazon's service to handle the big image files its customers upload. It gains the flexibility it needs to expand rapidly without having to invest capital in new machines and the property to house them. The company estimates it will save $500,000 in the first year of using the Amazon service.
6 Think thin
The ability to supply IT services over a speedy corporate network means that personal computers can be replaced with cheaper "thin clients". These are stripped down network terminals that lack the big hard drives and powerful chips of standard PCs. They draw their software applications and data from central servers. Thin clients are cheaper than PCs, but the real cost savings come from lower maintenance and upgrade costs.
Glynwood Metal Services, a UK metals distributor, has replaced 600 PCs with thin clients in its 30 offices nationwide. All the software required is run centrally on servers at the company's Southampton headquarters. When an upgrade is necessary, Glynwood only has to install the new software on the central server.
7 Conserve power
One of the biggest expenses in IT is electricity. As computer chips become more powerful, they suck in extra power and throw out more heat. One study estimates the total annual cost of the power used to run the world's server computers, plus related equipment such as data-centre air conditioners, is more than £3.5bn.
Microchip and computer makers are beginning to prioritise energy efficiency. Companies like AMD, Sun Microsystems, and HP are pioneering new cooling and power-management technologies that reduce kilowatt consumption. In planning your next data-centre upgrade, make energy efficiency a key criterion. Power savings can quickly offset the higher purchase price of energy-efficient equipment.
There are also easier ways to reduce power use. Employees leave their PCs on overnight, often running screensavers on their monitors; this wastes a lot of electricity. Just shutting off these machines when not in use can produce big savings-and helps the environment.
8 Offshore work
Among the biggest IT costs of all is salaries and benefits. Shifting jobs to countries with lower wages continues to offer cost cutting opportunities. Transco, the natural gas supplier has, since 2000, been using workers in India to update and support some of its software applications. The scheme has cut Transco's annual application support costs by 15 to 20 per cent, and reduced the incidence of errors and other problems.

9 Avoid customisation
It's natural for people to want to be innovative, but these days the instinct to be creative can backfire when it comes to computing. Many corporate IT departments try to customise their systems by writing their own code or configuring off-the-shelf applications to accommodate "unique" requirements. This undermines the cost savings that come from buying generic hardware and software. Customisation also increases complexity, which can push up maintenance costs and make collaboration with business partners more difficult.
10 Procrastinate
It's not always necessary to make outright cuts to save money. One way to reduce costs without foregoing new systems is to spend more slowly. The rapid fall in IT prices means that even small delays in purchases can slash costs. And delaying investments can bring other benefits. Companies that steer clear of brand new software reduce their chances of being saddled with buggy technology. They can also learn from the successes and mistakes of early adopters, enabling them to avoid unnecessary costs and often build better systems as well.

Nicholas Carr is the author of Does IT Matter? His next book, The Big Switch, will be published in January 2008.