If you’re planning on building a website and want to make a good impression on viewers, you need to know how to get it seen. There are five major points that will impact your Web ranking, including website speed, content, keywords, domain name and authenticity, or credibility. Make sure that you can hit each of these areas in order to get the most traffic, return visitors and the best performance possible.
Website Speed
Your website speed is one of the most important factors for visitors. If you use a flash-heavy site, you may not have the functionality for a quick-loading page. The same goes for large image files. Because of this, and potential for glitches due to long load times, you might lose precious search engine traffic. When someone leaves your page too quickly, it could have a negative impact on your search engine rank, and thereby cost you time, money and visitors in the long run.
When your site has consistently slow load times, it makes viewing harder for visitors using tablets, smartphones and other digital devices. To help the overall maneuverability of your website and to decrease your bounce rate, consider removing or shrinking the size of large images and graphics that have longer load times.
One site that has incredibly fast loading speeds that you’ve probably come across is Wikipedia. Because the site is primarily consists of text, small image and links, there are no large files, so you can get the information you’re looking for quickly.
Is Your Content Being Shared?
The real question her is: Does your site feature good content? If your content isn’t well written or attractive to viewers, people won’t share it. Realistically, your content needs to be up-to-date, interesting and easy to share.
Add share buttons to your posts, and make sure you don’t over add keywords in your writing, just a few keywords will do. What matters most is the quality of content over quantity of keywords. Additionally, add your content to your social media sites to increase visibility. Make it easy for people to share.
If you want an example of a great site for sharing, look at Tumblr. It offers users options where people can share to share content they see on a variety of different social media sites as well as email. Pinterest is also a popular site for images and back linking.
Your content should also be evergreen, and withstand the test of time. Although, piggy-backing on trends can also be good for quick bursts of traffic, you’ll want something more long lasting, especially if you want it to pull in new viewers time and time again. Be sure to include interesting content that will intrigue users time and time again if you want to increase repeat traffic.
Authenticity of Your Website
The information you provide on your website must be authentic. Copying work from other locations will impact the number of views your site will receive (not to mention your credibility).
Creating new content from scratch or filling the gap with content that other sites don’t offer can boost your search engine rankings and provide an opportunity for viewers to return to your site again and again.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a vital part of any website looking to earn a high search engine ranking. Without them, it’s difficult for the search engines, such as Google, to understand what your page is about. Repeating the same phrases or keywords will help you rank higher on search engine result pages. But how do you decide which to use?
Choose keywords that have low competition and high search volumes. Google provides a keyword tool that you can use to check the ranking of your keywords, too, so you can be sure that if you use it, you’re more likely to be seen. Google’s Keyword Planner can help.
Choosing a Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is an important task. You want to choose a domain name that reflects your company, product or service, and you want to make sure it is easy to remember. Most commonly, websites end in either.com, .net or .org. You can find sites with endings like .biz, .co.uk, .ca, and so on, which can be helpful if you are trying to attract a local market. These are also good options if the .com you wanted is not available.
When you choose your website’s domain name, pick a brand that is easy to remember. You may only have a few seconds to make an impression on someone, so you want to make that count. For example, a site all about math and science might want to try to get the domain name “mathandscience.com.” That makes sense, right? Likewise, if you’re a professional artist or businessperson with an online resume website. Be searchable by using your name as your website domain. Making it easy for people to find and remember you can help boost external views and return traffic.