You have spent countless hours designing and filling your website with useful content. Your site goes live and millions of people visit, sifting through content, filling out landing pages, and sharing your site’s URL across social media platforms. This is the dream, but almost never the reality. Designing your website and writing content is only the tip of the iceberg if you expect large volumes of consistent traffic. Even if you have the best content around it is completely useless if people are not viewing or sharing that content. The number one issue most websites have is being found. So why aren’t people visiting your website? This is a question with many answers, which are specific to your site. However, there are many things you can do to give your website the best possible chance to be found and shared.
Social Media has become a way of life, and it is often a way for people to find information they need, or perhaps did not even know they were searching for. A stand-alone website is great but it must be complimented with an entire social media suite. Not only should your organization take its web presence to the large players in the social media game (Google +, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc..) but it should also bring those social media platforms to the site itself. Allowing people to share content from your site with a click of a button makes it extremely easy for them to get the word out to their friends. People are much more likely to share something if it is convenient, and probably won't share if it requires them to manually post a link on their social media profile. Your website should have a Facebook “like” button, so users do not have to migrate away from your page to become a fan. It should also have a “tweet” option for the same reason. It also never hurts to include links to your various social media pages so users can easily add your organization. People that enjoy your content on social media will most likely continue to your site to see more.
SEO (search engine optimization) is obviously important in getting visitors to your site. It will assist people in finding you based on their needs via their search queries, so your site should be properly outfitted to inform search engines of your content. Content is KING! Write amazing content and make sure there is enough of it. Research and identify keywords that you think your target market is most likely to search, and base your content around those, and as always, provide a constant stream of this content. The biggest mistake people make is to see their website as a “set it, and forget it” type of entity. Your website should be constantly updated to provide new information that is up to date and informative. If no new information is being generated, why would anyone revisit your site?
I talk about blogging in just about every blog I write, ironic maybe, but it is so important to health of your site. Blogging is a great vehicle for this stream of content I was just speaking of. It is a perfect and easy way to continually add content to your site without displacing other important content. This content is also quite useful for SEO, as search engines see this content and will use it for their search engine results. Beyond that blog articles that can be easily shared are social media gold. Blog posts are the perfect area for those social sharing options we talked about in the second paragraph. People are likely to read blog posts suggested by friends over posts that are promoted.
Backlinks are still quite useful in both SEO and driving traffic. Backlinks simply refer to links to a website, more specifically an ideal backlink is a link to your site from a popular or reputable site. Not all backlinks are created equally, once upon a time there were services that offered to create 1,000’s of backlinks in exchange for a few dollars. These links would trick search engines into giving sites higher rankings but that is all a thing of the past. Now backlinks are considered based on a sites reputation and are much harder to achieve. Building relationships is the only way to receive positive back links. Reach out to people in the industry and exchange back links.
Getting people to your website and making sure they return is a lot of work, but it is work worth doing. We at Blue Frog pride ourselves on creating not only useful, informative websites but also websites that people return to time and time again. With Inbound Marketing the focus is to provide people with the information that they need in exchange for a lasting relationship. Attracting visitors to your site with SEO, Blogging, eBooks, and social media is only the first step in this relationship. Let us at Blue Frog help you convert those hard earned visitors into leads, with the inbound marketing philosophy!
