There are 4 basic ways to generate targeted traffic to a website:

1. Make sure your web site has enough text content on each web page. Along with relevant keyword phrases that truly describe the page in your titles, meta tags, and all internal links. Sites that are all Flash or graphics tend to do very poorly with the search engines.

2. Get as many incoming links from other relevant web sites. incoming links with well written texts can dramatically improve your Internet reach both from those sites linking to you as well as improve your search ranking positions.

3. Advertise on the search engines and other web sites that your targeted audience frequents. The key to pay-per-click advertising with the search engines is to have a good understanding of how pay-per-click advertising works and how to generate the best text ads for keywords. Don't do paid advertising if you are not going to track and measure your results.

4. Add your web site address (URL) to all your off-line advertising campaigns. It is amazing to see how many consumers go to the web after they see a company's TV ad, newspaper ad or hear them on the radio.  This is also true for direct mail and catalogs as well.

Lastly, do your research before signing up with any web marketing company. There a lot of web companies that play on the fact that many small businesses don't understand the web and you become any easy target for them. Ask  a lot of questions, know what you are getting into and make sure they are continually showing you the actual results. Make sure you are being shown unique visitors statistics too.

What many companies fail to realize is the importance of search engines when doing offline advertising (radio, newspaper, TV, magazines, billboards, etc). From managing and monitoring numerous web sites over the years I have seen over and over again people doing a search for a company some time after seeing or listening too their offline advertisement.

It might seem amazing that people don't just type in the web site address in their browser, but often time they remember the company but are unsure of their web site address. So they go to their favorite search engine and type in the company's name or some variation of their name.

Now here's the kicker... if your web site is not optimized correctly you may not show up, but your competitors if smart may show up instead. The worst case scenario is if you are doing a lot of offline advertising and don't have a web site! Your competition could be capturing your targeted audience at your offline advertising expense.

So what should you do? Use your head and make sure when doing offline advertising you have a website and it's optimized correctly for the search engines. Relevant page titles, meta tags and text content are critical. Use website analytics to monitor where people come from and what keyword phrases were most used to find your web site on the search engines.

Also, be sure to have some strong call to actions to engage your targeted audience once they land on your website.

Do you ever wonder how much text you should put on your web pages? Recently I read where the average person reads about 6 words per second. That would mean a page with 250 words would take 42 seconds to read and a web page with 500 words would take 1 minute 23 seconds to read. This is not taking into account how much of the content a person may retain.

This should definitely make you want to reduce the number of text words on each web page  Using graphic images and/or embedding a short video clip may also help readers to more quickly get the point of your page without having to read every word. Text on a web page is important, but not to the point of becoming overwhelming to the your readers who may be looking for a quick answer.