Many website administrators say that the easy part is creating a website. If you think of it, once you have the general idea of what it is you want it to do, all you need is to go on and build a rough semblance of what you have in mind.
You can slowly build upon the basic site and keep improving it until you are happy with what you see. Today, that is quite easily done with the help of templates and add-ons. You can make it look amazing in a few minutes and you can make it do wonders with just a few clicks.
Then comes the part where you have to share it with the world and work towards making them fall in love and appreciate it. You need to climb the popularity ladder and be in the top, at least, 20 sites on the first search engine results page (SERP) to consider your site a success – because, search engines too only like sites that are regularly visited and appear to be popular with visitors.
But, therein lies a sort of a “Catch 22” – How do you get people to come and visit your site if it doesn’t rank high on SERPs? Well, you simply have to make sure that your site first achieves and then maintains its popularity without the direct help of search engines.
How? Let’s have a look:
Creative Content
One thing that is sure to keep visitors on your site is the information that you provide to them. Your site should be able to address all requirements when it comes to your visitors queries.
Always have content on your site that is up to date. Always make sure that you are on top of the subject that your site is about. In a world where information changes as fast as it does today, you cannot afford to be left behind. If you’re out of date, you’re out of visitors’ sight.
Go With “Easy”
Many web administrators get so carried away with their design that it all ends up being a huge mess. Navigation becomes so complicated that visitors simply get lost and move off of the site.
You can never lose with “easy” and “straight forward” – in fact if you look at reviews of websites, those remarks are some of the most repeated ones when describing popular sites. Don’t make your visitors worry about something they don’t have to. If they want to get from point “A” to point “B”, then that is exactly what is expected from you – nothing more.
Plenty of Action
One thing that makes a site popular is the fact that the visitors have plenty of stuff to do once they arrive on it. Whether it is a gaming site or a simple WordPress blog, you need to find creative ways of making your visitors stay longer. For example, you should be able to make them play your games for as long as possible in the first case and make them want to read as much as possible of the content on your blog by interlinking them to other related/relevant posts in the second.
You can make them come back, by promising to update them at a later time. As soon as you have added something to your site, go on and let them know.
Social Media Link Positioning
Our social life in the online world is dominated by Facebook – there is no denying it. That social media network has managed to garner a fair share of the world’s population. There are billions of people talking to one another at any given moment.
What is surprising is that there are still plenty of websites that do not see the correlation between social media networks and raising a site’s popularity.
It, therefore, makes it a “popularity sin” if you create a website and forget to place social media links on each and every page or you put them in a place where they are easy to miss. In fact, some web administrators do put the links on every page, they are clear as a nose on a face, but they put them in an inappropriate position – like at the top of the page.
Wouldn’t you rather you placed them right after the last sentence in your story has ended? That way, the excitement of having gone through your article or post will encourage your readers to click on the link. But if it is up at the beginning of the page – you might miss out on all but the most loyal of your fans’ shares.
Your Hosting Solution
Your website only exists because your web hosting solution provider has made it possible for your site to be visible to the world – and that’s a good thing, because you wouldn’t want to be burdened with all the technicalities that are involved in webhosting.
But, if you make the mistake of choosing a less than competent hosting provider, you could lose plenty of traffic – if not all of it.
Monitor your host provider. Check to see that traffic from all over the world is coming to your site (you can use various tools). Check loading speed from different countries and try to improve it by either shedding some heavy content from your end or moving/replicating your site to a server that is closer to your clients.
It’s “Feedback” for a Reason
You might think you know exactly what it is that your visitors are looking for – but you’re wrong. There is no formula that lets you figure out what will make them happy. They are individuals, which means, you have to have an answer to just as many unique demands.
Now, while you might never be able to address all the demands, one way of making sure that you at least get as close as possible to doing so, is by creating a platform where you can receive regular feedback from the visitors themselves.
You can use a comment section after every article or post. You can create a forum where visitors can meet and hang out with other visitors. You can also create a “Contact Us” form and let them send in their concerns directly to you.
Whatever the method, make sure you do take note of what they have to say and then move to address their issues as quickly and as best as you can. Do not forget to reply to emails. This sense of being “approachable” is one of the best ways of building a loyal following.
All having been said, you should always remember that the points mentioned above are not one-time solutions. You should always monitor and keep updating your site.
