If you are ready to take your business dreams into the real world, you need a plan. One of the very first things you need to do is announce your presence, and a website is the best way of doing this.  Here, we look at how, once you have built your site, you can make sure the traffic is continuously flowing.

The very first thing you need to do is make sure that your website is simple to use and aesthetically pleasing. Don't clutter it with adverts and fancy gimmicks - the cleaner it is, the more professional and easier on the eye it is. You also need to make sure every element of it works correctly, and regularly do checks for broken links. This will not only avoid your customers becoming frustrated but will also help to improve your ranking on Google and other search engines.

Once your website is looking shipshape, you need to make sure the content is too. The best way of doing this is to think about what your readers and visitors want and give it to them. Are they coming to you for industry news and updates, opinions, advice or information, or simply to view products and services? Whatever it is, make sure it is updated and refreshed regularly. If you are purely a retail store, we advise having some sort of blog section as well for your visitors to read. Google, in particular, looks for websites that have good reader engagement, and this is the best way to do it.

Search engine optimization or SEO as it is more commonly known is also an essential part of bringing traffic to your website. It can be quite challenging to get your head around to start with, but once you have got the basics in place, it is really quite easy. Essentially, it is about thinking about what keywords people would use to find your website and using them within your content, meta descriptions and alt descriptions on images. It is always worth having a free SEO audit to see what you are getting right and what might need improving. You can also use plugins such as Yoast to help you manage SEO if you are using Wordpress as a platform for your website.

Promotion is the easiest way of bringing traffic to your site, and this can be done on a minimal budget. Social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the perfect places to reach a wide range of people very quickly. Set up pages that engage your followers and encourage them to click through to your website - perhaps offer incentives such as discounts or competitions. You may also want to consider targeted advertising, which does cost but compared to traditional forms of advertising is inexpensive and effective. Once people have clicked through to your website, encourage them to sign up for a newsletter which is delivered to their email inbox. You could send discount codes and promotions through, as well as keeping them up to date with news.