Although content is still considered king in the online world, there are many other factors to remember if you want your website to succeed.
If content is king, understanding who is queen can help to not only boost your rankings within search engines, but also appeal to a much wider audience. Learning more about optimising your site, improving its overall images and ensuring your visitors understand the purpose is a way to ensure you are reaching as many individuals as possible regardless of your target audience or demographic.
Obviously content is majorly important, but it isn’t everything. Here we take a look at some of the other factors that you need to marry with great content to ensure the success of your website.
Optimising Your Site
When you want a website or blog to become successful online, optimisation is essential. Optimising your website is possible by learning more about SEO, or search engine optimisation. SEO is a way to boost your site’s rankings within the most popular search engines; such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. The more optimised your website is for search engines, the easier it is to share content with new visitors and potential customers or clients.
Begin by researching the core keywords that users input to find products and services like yours. The create targeted meta titles and descriptions for each page optimised with those keywords.
Creating headlines with proper H1 and H2 tags is essential to boost your visibility within search engines. Adding hyperlinks to content, bolding specific keywords that you are focusing on and sharing your content on other blogs are all methods to help boost rankings within today’s top search engines.
Social Sharing
Although not a direct factor in improving the rankings of your website, there is no boubt that social sharing can boost referral traffic.
Adding social media plugins and sharing tools to articles on your site, as well as sharing your content on your social channels, can drastically help to boost your traffic.
Website Aesthetics
The say don’t judge a book by its cover, but in reality that’s what most people will do. The same is true for websites.
Knowing the importance of website aesthetics is also essential when you want to have a successful blog or website online. Ensuring your website is visually-appealing and also relevant to your audience is a way to keep users browsing your site for longer periods of time. Incorporating a well-designed logo and an attractive colour scheme based on your target market will help visitors to decide in a flash that this site might have what they’re looking for and actually stick around to read more.
A poorly designed or amateurish appearance is more likely to increase your bounce-rate as visitors will make a snap judgement that this site is not for them.
Even if you have some of the best content online regarding the topic you are focusing on and highlighting, without a proper design it can be challenging to get others to take the time to read and review it on their own.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Working to improve conversion rates is essential. All of your other marketing and content efforts are a waste of time, effort and money if the traffic you’re bringing into your website doesn’t convert to leads and ultimately to sales.
Tell customers what your offer, why they need it and why your offering fulfils those needs better than your competitors can. Then tell customers exactly what they should do next. Add calls to action in both the text and visuals of the site (buttons, banners etc.).
Adding calls to action to your site’s homepage and within sidebars and footers is a way to continuously share your message with visitors who are reading content, shopping or simply learning more about what your website has to offer for them.
Compatibility
With the ever increasing popularity of smartphones and m-commerce it is essential to ensure your site is compatible with multiple browsers and various platforms. Whether a user is browsing within Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari – on a desktop, laptop, tablet or phone – it is important to ensure your website maintains its appearance and overall functionality.
Improve Loading Times
If you are having load time issues with your site it is of the utmost importance to address these sooner than later. It’s best to work with professional web developers to improve the loading times of your site as it can involve some intricate code work. They will look at things like caching, code images and find ways to improve the load time of your webpages.
Understanding the importance of learning about who is queen when it comes to running successful sites online is a way to outshine competitors while increasing the number of visitors and leads you receive. The more proactive you become with optimising your site for visitors on any platform and within multiple browsers, the easier it is to maintain relevance and to captivate the interest of your audience.
