Our Top 5 Tips to Get and Keep Visitors to your Websites

Below are a list of 5 key points that you need to consider and research in relation to drawing more attention to you website.

Search Engine Ranking

Though there are many other means to lure web customers Search Engines remain certainly, for the foreseeable future, the key to a websites popularity. Please take a look at our article entitled ‘Top 10 Search Engine Listing and Ranking Tips.’ for more information on this.

Getting Linked

In the simplest terms the more websites that point/link to yours the more chance surfers have of finding it. ‘Quality links’ are the key here. A link from a website that Google & Yahoo in particular deem ‘important’ or rank highly for example the ‘BBC’ website, will be far more useful to your own sites ‘importance’ than say Dave the builders that has little or no ranking.

Avoid link exchange sites, increasingly the major Search Engines are discounting them.

Quality and Quantity

It cannot be stressed enough how important up to date, relevant content is to attracting and most importantly retaining a web audience. A cleanly designed, easily navigatable website with exciting fresh content will always retain a users attention for the long term, more than a striking Flash website that looks stunning but tells you nothing.

On the same point your front page must be both attractive and informative. You have very little time to gain a users attention, if there is nothing of interest immediately clear to them, or they cannot find what they are looking for why should they stay, let alone return.

Update Frequency

There is nothing worse than finding a website than covers exactly the areas you were looking for, but on return nothing has been added or changed. If you run a website say with a ‘Latest News’ section you must try to update it on a regular basis, otherwise it is useless.

A good idea here might also to be highlight a particular area of your website for say a month, for example an area showcasing a recent addition to your portfolio then focus on a newer project next month and so on.

Updating your content will also let Search Engines know it is worth ‘spidering’ your website regularly, if there has been no changes in 6 months why would they bother to look again?

Creating a Community

Our final tip deals primarily with retention of audience, basically offering the visitor a good reason to return to your website.

Offering a forum and or chat area or areas with useful regularly updated information, plus the ability to communicate with other people with similar interests gives a great reason to return to your site and ideally add it to their favourites.

Blogs and Web casts are also great ways to do this though they may require far more input from the webmaster.

Hopefully this has been of interest and use.

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