It’s no use putting on a friendly face, and hoping that your visitors will be happy – you have to work to keep them happy.

Visitor satisfaction must run through all aspects of your website. Much is commonsense:

• Encourage customer feedback
• Prompt response to feedback
• Clear site policies
• Consistent navigation

Most of all, you have to overdeliver in every department. There are a couple of essential tools which I have added to my WordPress Installation pack.

Getting Visitors

I’ve mentioned TailHitter before. With a few server moves and reconfigurations coming up, I’ve gone ahead and installed it today. Very simple, and the HitTail code works fine. One thing to watch – WP-Cache will still be holding pages without the HitTail code. Normally this will not matter, but if you want to test the search results on HitTail, disable the cache first – or at least view the source before you test to make sure the HitTail code is at the bottom of the page.

Obviously the TailHitter plugin is not absolutely vital, as you can easily paste the code into your footer.php. But then you run the risk of losing HitTail when you change themes. And HitTail certainly is essential, especially as part of my marketing tool trio.

Keeping Visitors

When you’ve gone to all that trouble to attract visitors, what is the point of being rude to them? One bad feature of WordPress is the way it adds the nofollow tag to links in comments. I won’t bore you by discussing the pros and cons of no follow, chiefly because their are no pros.

Suffice to say, that DoFollow is an essential part of your visitor management system. Let the good guys have their say and recognize their contribution with a fair link that search engines will follow. You can easily blacklist the bad guys with Akismet, and help us all in the process.

Blog style websites have long been the easiest to promote, and blog promotion just got easier. And better.

John Reese is a long-standing source of top quality management information. In his latest venture, BlogRush, he has launched an incredible blog promotion tool.

I will add an extra element to my small business web site installation wizard to include post-launch promotion features.

Top of the list has to be inclusion in the BlogRush network. If you want terrific free traffic generating power, you need this small business web site promotion tool.

Sign-up for BlogRush is very quick, but note that you need to be able to add javascript to your blog, so free WordPress.com sites will not be eligible.

Installation is a breeze. For widget enabled themes, simply add a text widget and paste in the code. Other themes will need to paste the code into their sidebar template.

You should be able to install this extremely valuable free small business web site promotion tool in seconds. If you have any problems, let me know, and I will do all I can to help you – this is too important for you to miss .

I find these policy pages a tad tedious, but a necessity. They add weight to your website (when was the last time you saw policy pages on a spammy scraper site?). More importantly, they immediately let visitors know where you stand on various issues.

I’m surprised, but delighted to see that I’m already getting inbound links, as well as search engine hits. You may remember that I started writing about links, mainly because the marvelous HitTail reported that I’d been found by a search for hosting links. HitTail suggested that I write more about it, and I did.

Another fan of HitTail picked up on my post and linked back to me, noting:

Hittail not only saves you time, but also helps drive people to your website, and what’s better than that!?

That’s the great thing about WordPress, it builds an automatic hosting links web site. It’s not quite perfect though. It likes to add the “rel=nofollow” condition to outbound links. I don’t, for reasons I’ll explain when I install a plugin that gets round this very easily.

Until then, if you want to know more about building or running a successful hosting links web site campaign, or tell me your opinions, comment below or via my Contact Page

Many webmasters fall into the trap of trying to build as many links as they can. A common way to do this is to search for links or add url, or similar, together with the keyword or keyphrase that you want a link from (or want to exchange links with).

I describe this as a trap because what you can easily end up with is a collection of inbound links that give you no traffic, no search engine value, and might even lower your search engine rankings.

Now this is not really a webmaster hosting issue, and I will cover it in more detail on my web management site, but webmasters do need to be aware of the potential risks.

Before I talk about those risks, I must explain why I am writing about hosting links today. The reasons are very important for any business web host.

Last week I described the simple process of installing HitTail code. Though there are many methods for tracking how visitors find your website (known as referrers), HitTail is the best. It automatically builds and analyzes a referrer database. Normally, you would have to maintain your own logs, compare them with your site content and produce a report of suggested topics for new articles (or new keywords that suit existing articles).

HitTail produces this list for you, saving you massive amounts of time. If you are working on your own site, just add more content around the suggested phrases, or amend existing content to add more keywords. If you are managing the site for a client or employer, just pass the list on, and earn yourself a raise.

HitTail suggested I needed some content about hosting links. So here it is.

If you are building links through directories and similar sites, avoid the ones with low page rank. The easiest way to do this is to install SEO for Firefox, which shows the page rank for Google and Yahoo search engine results. If you are not using FireFox, I highly recommend that you use it. You can still use your existing browser after you install it.

The best way to add links is through forming relationships with other quality sites in a related subject. You should have a linking policy on your site, to guide people who want to link to you, and inform them how you link to other sites.

Do not build links pages – build quality content where external links add value by reinforcing, explaining, or extending the points you make.

If you want to know more about hosting links, add your comments below or email me using my Contact Page.