A company's website is its online personality and image and should ideally attract clients, generate sales, as well as lead and deliver valuable content.

People primarily visit a website to seek information, research facts, make a purchase, or to converse with others.

Ideally visitors of a website will stay as long as possible, remain loyal and visit frequently, recommend the website to others, and find value in the information presented.

Some industry statistics state that the average person spends 20 seconds on a website, certainly less than 2 minutes, so it is essential to have a quality website to avoid a high bounce rate, percentage of single page visits.

Visitors find websites through several channels such as a business card, an advertisement, or link, however, search engines are the primary means of locating a website.

A search engine is a software program that searches the world wide web for specified keywords and presents a list of results in the form of “search engine results pages” (SERPS). 

Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the top three search engines.

Crawler-based search engines are the most popular. They employ software robots called spiders that scour the web, usually starting with the most popular servers and pages, and read the information on the site, including titles and meta tags.

They also follow every link on the site. 

A program called an indexer reads the documents and builds lists based on the words found, and their location. Users can then search based on the words or combination of words found in the indexes.

Optimally a website will obtain a high ranking placement and frequency in search result lists, thus increasing the probability of increased traffic and visits.

The process of achieving this is called “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO).  

Keywords are the words and phrases people enter into search engines to find related websites, so it is essential that a website has the optimal keywords in the right places.

A website should have the most favorable and targeted keywords, with high density in the content, and appearing in the page title, links, descriptions, tags, and headings. 

Keyword tools are available for free on the internet, the most popular paid package is Wordtracker.

Without a doubt, what is most important is content, the primary driver to engage visitors. Content is king and is often described as the currency of a website.

Content should be useful, interesting, relevant, attention grabbing, and fresh. There are several ways to issue frequent content. 

Newsletters, articles, and press releases are excellent ways to publish regular content. 

“Top 10” lists, celebrity interviews, quizzes, contests, and seasonal related content tend to be popular. If a website routinely issues updates, StumbleUpon is an excellent social media and bookmarking site that can allows members to share links and rate content, resulting in increased traffic.

Exchanging links with other websites improves search engine rankings, if the websites compliment each other and both the websites are relevant in their respective niches, and can direct targeted traffic to a site.

There are Internet companies that set up links and banners.

Some of the best known ones are Link Exchange and Banner Exchange.

There are hundreds of more ways, getting professional help given the complexity and constant change in this area, is usually best.

Anthony Galliano is the chiefexecutive of Cambodian InvestmentManagement.  [email protected]