In this day and age, nearly anyone can spin up a quick WordPress site from a hosting company, select some decorative features, add titles, and claim to have a fully functioning professional website. It will not necessarily be pretty or effective, but it will be live on the web ready for people to interact with. However, what if no one ever finds it?
Not a Fire-and-Forget
This is actually the default situation these days when you treat a website as a fire-and-forget. Competition for the top spots with prized keywords is so intense that without the right design choices and a smart search engine optimization (SEO ) strategy, you will see your monthly unique visitor figures hovering in the hundreds, and that is if you are lucky. It takes tens of thousands of views to really start making an impact, and much more if you want to make significant online revenue.
What does the upkeep of a site look like? It is too involved to fully describe here, but let us look at three key aspects:
Well-Organized Content
Search engines favor content that will lead to high engagement – meaning that users do not get bored with the site the second they load it. This includes content placed near the top, pictures that capture attention, meaningful anchor text, and easy navigation.
Quality Blogging Content
Search engines prefer fresh content. Blogging is one of the most important activities for visibility, and should be done on a daily basis. Furthermore, recent algorithm changes such as Google Panda and Penguin have cut down on “black hat SEO” techniques that lead to low-quality, duplicated content all over the web. These days, you need to play fair – the content must be meaningful, well-written, useful to the audience, and preferably come from a subject matter expert. This leads well into the next point.
Quality Links
Google completely changed the game of web search when it made quality of links the center of its ranking algorithms. However, as mentioned above, it has had to retool greatly in order to fluster those who were gaming the system. Quality links are still important, however, and in fact guest bloggers and social media sharing are becoming the new focal points for establishing legitimacy.
This is just the beginning of what you need in order to make your presence felt on the net. If you are interested, contact us for a personalized consultation.