The single most critical factor for website success is attracting visitors and retaining those visitors. By building a web community around your site and using the correct keywords, you can quickly grow your gain online presence and rise up in the search engine rankings.
Once you have achieved that, the next step is to see if your efforts have been worth it. A great free tool to use is Google Analytics. By using this tool you can find out where your visitors are coming from, the browser they use, which pages they love on your website, and which pages they don’t, as well as other interesting information. This information can then be finely tuned to keep the visitors coming back. If your website was the best looking and most flashy in the world, it wouldn’t do you much good if it was just sitting out there and gaining no attention. You have to get visitors to your website and in order for it to thrive you, need to find the best ways of attracting visitors – and keep them coming back in their droves.
How do I promote my website?
The following explains some great little tips which are valuable for promoting your website and helping you to keep your visitors for longer:
#1 Build a great website
Never promote a website if there is nothing to see on it. There is nothing worse than visitors going to your website and it has a “website under construction” message in the middle of the screen, especially if this message has been there for months on end. Once you have some content, make sure that it is written with your visitors in mind and always keep it fresh. It is not all about fancy images and flash wizardry – for search engines and users alike it is more about having great quality content that will keep your visitors interested. If in doubt always ask yourself the question: “If I was browsing the web, would I stay on this site?”. Alternatively, you can always ask a friend.
This is where you start to build your community. Word of mouth promotion is free and is always a good way to coerce traffic to your website. Sharing your links with friends will entice people to link through to your website, enabling you to gain more traffic, as well as helping you to climb up the rankings in search engines.
Meta tags contain hidden words that convey important information about content on your site, for example the site description and keywords that you want to be found for. Search engines will use them as a way to help determine what your website is all about.
#4 Submit your website to search engines
Although your website may get crawled by search engines naturally, most provide URL submission tools and Webmaster tools that let you inform search engines about your site and submit a sitemap. As soon as you submit to the big guns – Google, Yahoo and Bing you are in the public eye. But you still have work to do to climb the rankings and get noticed on the first page, which is really where you need to be.
How do I attract visitors?
Attracting new visitors is critical to promoting your website, but return visitors are just as important. The true popularity of a website is determined by visitors who return over and over again. If people find your content interesting then it is more than likely they will return and share the link with their friends, but you also need to consider how fresh your content is. There is no point updating your website once every few months as it will barely get noticed. Update your content regularly and you will flourish. Don’t be fooled into thinking that no one will notice if the content has not changed. Your visitors are more savvy than you think and will most likely delete their link if they feel that your site holds no value. In addition to fresh and interesting content, building an active community around your website is fundamental to keep visitors coming back. Three good techniques are: social media integration with sites like Twitter and Facebook, blogging and discussion forums. These attract visitors like bees to a honey pot and will encourage them to feel included. Get this right and you will have created a website that attracts and keeps visitors.
Getting support
Opace Technology Solutions are successful Web Design Birmingham consultancy who specialise in creative design and internet marketing. We will work with you to help you realise the full potential of your website and help you every step of the way. Our services include website refresh, blog development, content writing and social media marketing services to ensure your website remains fresh, informative and of value to your target customers.
Image credit – Raúl Hernández González
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