How to make your website work harder for you

Previously seen as an afterthought, more companies are seeing the value to be had in actively improving their website.

Is your company’s internet presence going unnoticed? This might be because what you thought was the hard part, has only just begun. These days it’s not enough just to simply have a website to bring in visitors, you have to actively make it an attractive destination for consumers who are surfing the web. The Internet can play an important role in marketing your business, however you have to know how to make it work for you.

Your online presence can be seen in two phases. The first is successfully bringing people to your page, while the second is keeping them there long enough for your message to have been communicated. The following are some tips that can both increase the traffic that is coming to your site and encourage people to continue looking once they have arrived.

Reeling them in
Events on the Internet happen in the blink of an eye. This means that you need to keep your website fresh and up to date if you want to see it coming to the top of the Google and Bing searches. Strategies like maintaining a blog or a current news feed are easy ways in which to keep the content on your website fresh and give people new reasons to visit your site.

Having said that, it is important to keep the content you publish meaningful. If you are simply posting the same thing using slightly different terminology, not only are you compromising the quality of your website, you are not doing meaningful work to improve your website’s search engine optimization, as search algorithms can decipher deliberate attempts to put as many keywords on your website as possible. But if you truly believe the work that you do is important and can offer invaluable service to your customers, content should be able to flow with a little bit of insight.

Keeping visitors engaged
So you having given them a reason to visit, the challenge is being a good host and giving your guests a reason to stay. Inc. Magazine explains that websites can be viewed in a sense like newspapers. In the “olden days” of hardcopy newspapers, the attention grabbing news stories would be listed “above the fold,” meaning they would be the first thing that a reader saw so as to draw them into the paper. This concept can be applied to your website as well, by making the most attention grabbing and attractive pieces of content the easiest to access. It is only so much to have a great piece of content – you have to put it in a place that makes visitors want to see it.

Software can now point out where the highest and lowest amounts of traffic on your website are arriving, and in doing so, see what sections are receiving the most action. If you notice that a particular page is not being visited nearly as much as others others, you may want to consider where its short comings lie. It could simply be that it is in a difficult to reach spot or it could be that people are not interested in the information it has to offer. This should prompt you to evaluate what it is this particular page is doing for your site. If you feel that information is important for your visitors, it should be put in an easier to access location, but if you feel like it might be extraneous, it probably is.

A website is all about giving potential customers a reason to visit and a reason to stay. What forms of content have you used to accomplish these goals?

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