Last Updated on March 6, 2024
Did you know that every day more than 100 million pages emerge in the online universe? Sounds cool for the reader, but scary for a website owner. Obtaining traffic and increasing your pageviews is essential to stay afloat online. There are only two ways to make money on the Internet: Selling something or advertising.
The biggest challenge websites owners face today is staying relevant in the ocean of constant information. You should focus on making an irresistible website. Make it so great that the reader will feel guilty for not bookmarking your page. Let’s have a look what’s missing on your website and what you need to do to improve your web presence.
Quality Content
Let’s suppose I’m looking for some information about drawing tutorials. I want something that will be informative and educational. If I stumble upon a website with a “How to draw a cat” tutorial, then I’ll automatically assume that the website is filled with more useful tutorials and techniques, if not, then I’ll simply leave. It may seem obvious, but I’ve seen this way too many times before.
When it comes to content, websites often go after the shotgun approach rather than a sniper approach. If you do this, get ready to lose readers from the ‘get go’ as a result. Always focus on a specific niche. Don’t make a website that will cover cool cars, but also interior design, and maybe some cooking tutorials. This isn’t smart. Unless you have a huge team of writer and tons of VC money, key in on one subject and make yourself an expert.
One of the most critical benchmarks of a good website is great content. You can take this article and website as an example. If this website is not offering you what you seek, you wouldn’t even be reading it to this point. You would’ve left already.
Thanks to Google, readers always have a choices. It’s your duty to provide your reader with the high quality content. If you can’t write proper content, you must hire a professional writer for this purpose.
Search Engine Optimization
If you’re on the 10th page of Google search results, then who on earth is going to find your website?
Search Engine Optimization will make or break your website. Don’t try to be slick, gaming Google isn’t very smart. Chances are, they’re two steps ahead of you. Play by Google’s rules and your website won’t be hit hard by the constant algorithm updates.
The first thing Google looks for are social media links. Implement all social media links that you can, supporting your website with a corresponding Facebook and Twitter page. The next thing is to make sure your website has links from other websites. These are called ‘backlinks’ or ‘deep-links.’ All you need to do is submit your website to the various blogs via guest blogging.
The blogs will redirect their readers to your website. Before doing so, check the page rank of that blog or website. Don’t opt for article directories since Google has rejected them. Guest Blogging is the accepted way now. Don’t ever pay for ‘black hat’ methods to increase your ranking or traffic. Once again, Google picks up on these ‘tricks’ very fast.
Speed
Have you ever visited a website and waited more that 30 seconds for it to lead. Yeah, me neither. Unless it’s an article that tells me the meaning of life, I leave right away.
That may sounds harsh, but it’s 100% true. In the last decade people have been trained to have web pages load almost instantaneously. Go to Goolge.com and tell me how fast it takes to load. Pretty fast right? It only took me 1.8 seconds.
Google is the most visited website in the world. People who use it are used to the speed, therefore they automatically assume that websites should load as fast as that. If it takes longer, they’ll give it a few more seconds, but that’s it. Focus on making your website as fast as possible. .
It’s easy to do this as many website services are available, where you can ‘cache’ and ‘compress’ your web content. This means that your web content is made compact (on the side the readers can’t see) which allows the page to load easily and quickly.
Media is a Lifeline
Don’t hesitate to use audio, videos, graphics, photos, etc. These items are very influential and will give more life to long articles. Don’t overdue them, try to find a good balance. Visually illustrating a story is quite helpful for visual learners.
Navigation and Appearance
Having an ugly website is no longer an excuse. You don’t have to pay thousand of dollars for a custom website. You can download thousands of free or premium templates and have decent looking website. Aim for something simple, yet straight to the point.
You need a clean navigation, our logo in the top right or left side, a search bar, some of your top posts in the sidebar, social media links for people to follow you, basic pages (contact, about, private policy, etc.), thumbnails for you posts, clear headings, and some ‘easy on the eyes’ colors.
I hope these tips have helped you. Good luck!