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Having a website is all well and good but it won’t make a blind bit of difference to your start-up if your site has no traffic or visibility. Below are some simple steps to follow, if you take them up you should see increased traffic to your site. All revolve around the key themes of linking and content. NOTE: It helps if your product/service is good!
Links to/on your site
Links play a huge part in your search engine ranking. There are two types of links that you need to understand. On-site links link from content on your site to other areas of your website. Think Wikipedia. Links on the site to other pages will significantly reduce the bounce rate for your website’s pages and increase the time spent on your website.
You must also consider off-page links. Search engines now measure your website’s importance by the quality of the sites linking to your website and then to a lesser extent the volume of links that point to your site. You can use tools such as page rank checker, to see how important a website is (10 being the best), and back link checkers to see what sites are linking to your website. Search for these tools in Google to find free ones. Deep links i.e. pointing to your sub-pages are better for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) than just posting to your homepage. Use keywords to link to your site as well (if you are able to, some websites won’t allow it.) For example “invoice finance”.
Shout from the roof tops that you have a website
Once you have set up your website there is no point just resting on your laurels. You need to broadcast to everyone that you have a great product/service that is being advertised on the most awesome website in the world. A good place to start is with a blog, it could either be on your site or on another website that links to yours. A blog is a great way to share any information or message you want – these can be thoughts on certain topics or even tips and lists in order to educate readers about your industry. Blogs can enhance your SEO reputation and boost your presence on the web. Top tip: don’t make your posts to sales orientated, people will then know that they are just reading an advert and are unlikely to take-in or share the article.
Content
Following on from the last point, your website needs to have original and informative content. By writing original articles, something that’s useful, informative, funny, free, beneficial or helpful, for instance, you’ll encourage people to link to what you’ve created. Links to your website, especially from sites that are more established than your own, will help boost the visibility of yours in search engines. It is useful to put your keywords in your pages titles whenever you can. Keywords that are in a different format, size or in the title, Google will give a higher weighting to them. If your website has images it is definitely worth extending the filenames to include keywords, as well as putting them in the ALT tags. You could also write a description of the image also when embedding the image in your website. All SEO techniques start with good content creation.
Engage with your market
If blogging is a way of informing then social media can be a way of discovering and interacting with your market. Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter bring together content and conversation, with a potential audience of thousands. The onus is on you, answer questions, respond to comments; be a sociable business rather than one that just simply sells.
Keep tracking, analyse and adapt
Hopefully you have created a website that has good quality links and excellent content, so therefore you website is beginning to get noticed and a following is developing (the good kind, not stalker-bad). It is quite hard to find out where all your new leads are coming from. Most sites offer their own tracking software, for example WordPress. Installing Google’s Analytics code is recommended as it can show how many people are visiting your site, what they are looking at and how long they are staying for. You can use this analytical information to tinker with your content and inks on different pages and see if you can get visitors to stay for a greater amount of time on them. Analytics will also show what is popular on your website and thus highlight what areas are probably worth producing extra related content for.
Related articles
- 5 Cost Effective ways to market your business (thestartupmag.com)
- Steps to take when starting your business (thestartupmag.com)
- Ways of Raising Finance for Start-ups (thestartupmag.com)
