No Site Is An Island: Make Your Website Easy To Find
Your next great business idea won’t gain a lot of interest if no one knows it’s available. Websites are one of the easiest ways to make your business accessible to the general public, but it’s not as simple as buying a domain, making it look good, then waiting for your target audience to stumble upon it. As of 2014, there are more than 1 billion websites on the internet - even if you don’t factor in the websites that are live but inactive, that’s still a lot of searching for your target audience to do before they eventually find your website. If you want your business to thrive, growing your website is a crucial step, so here are a few ways you can help your readers find your website amongst a vast sea of other websites on the internet.
Search Engine Optimization
The best way to make sure anyone can find your website is to make it easy to find on a search engine. SEO involves using keywords and phrases in your domain name and homepage that are relevant to your business, and are likely to type into search engines like Bing or Google - these two search engines offer the option of submitting your link onto their platform to improve your SEO ranking. To find out what keywords your customers may be searching check out Google Keyword Suggestion Tool. When submitting your website to the search engines, you can either do it manually by going to the search engine website and adding your URL (website address) or you can employ the services of a Search Engine Submission company, who will do it for you. Google suggests using keywords in the URL, making the site navigation easy, and avoiding long URLs as much as possible.
Create backlinks to your site
Backlinks are essentially links from other sites to your site, and in a simple sense Google uses them to determine whether your website is successful, and thus deserving of a high rank in its search results. The more reputable sites you have linking back to your website, the better your ranking on Google. There are a few ways you can generate backlinks, one of them is to reach out to blog owners and asking them to feature links to your content on their sites. Most blog owners are happy to do this - as long as the content matches their website - because if the ad comes to them from a Google AdWords company, they’re likely to make money from featuring your link on their website depending on how many clicks it gets. Just try to avoid reaching out to companies that promise to create thousands of backlinks for you, because Google will penalise your site if it thinks there is some spam activity going on.
Write relevant content
Usually your target audience will use search engines to look up certain articles based on their own questions or interests, and this is a perfect way to help them find your website. Writing web content is an excellent way to present your expertise to your target audience, but you have to write content that is relevant to your visitors; forget that you know everything about the subject matter - including the confusing jargon - and write for an outsider. It might help if you include a few anecdotes, or funny metaphors to make the material easier to understand. It might also help if you posted your content on a regular basis. You don’t need to write 300 articles per day to boost your website traffic, but whether you post new material daily or weekly, you need to be posting consistently in order to generate enough interest in your site. Remember, it’s going to take time for people to take you seriously, but if you keep posting on a regular basis you can establish a rapport with your readers. Eventually, they will recognise you as an expert and start buying what you’re selling. Also, making your headlines short, snappy, but relevant will make them easier to find during a Google search.
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