There are many reasons why you would create a website. You may want a site for your business, or perhaps you are a photographer who wants to showcase your photos. Whatever the reason is, the main metric of success for a website is how many visitors it gets, and there are a few ways of driving traffic, which we will discuss later on. Websites are often key components of a business because they hold most of the information a potential customer needs to know there. Below are some tips to make your new website a success.
Have a great design
Having a clear and clean user interface is a great start to building a successful website. If the pages and text are clear, and the process of going through the website is smooth with short loading times, then you are well on your way to your website succeeding. If the user has a bad experience, however, with slow loading, dead pages and ugly formatting, for example, don’t expect them to hang around for long and this will affect your website ranking, pushing your site further down search engine results.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You may have seen this acronym a lot but what exactly does it mean? SEO is the process of increasing your site’s visibility to people when they search for you or things relevant to your page in search engines such as Google and Bing.
Using relevant keywords, metadata and links on your page are of utmost importance in driving traffic to a page. To put things simply, if a person were to search “booking meeting room” on a search engine, and this is what your business provides, you will want to make sure that such keywords appear somewhere on your site and they are relevant. Creating your site in a way that allows the search engine to find you and determine you are relevant is considered SEO.
Original content
The most successful websites have original content, whether it be photos, videos or text. If the search engine detects if you have unique, high-quality content, your search ranking will rise and this will contribute to its success. By having original, interesting content, the visitor will stay on the site longer and have a look around, giving you a better chance for conversion into a sale or whatever your objective is. If a visitor opens up your site and immediately closes the page, this damages your search ranking.
Good security
To be considered safe, websites are required to have SSL certificates and use HTTPS protocol. While you may not notice if you go on pages without such security, search engines such as Google will alert you to this and recommend you close the page as your details may not be safe. Having the world’s largest and most popular search engine warning people about your website being unsafe can be a killer. Having such security ensures that the connection between the visitor and the website is encrypted and cannot be (easily) read.