Are you making the most of your site? Are you doing all that you can do with it? First it’s prudent to remember why you have a site in the first place and to recall what its role is supposed to play in your business. Once you compile those recollections, then you can answer our questions. If you’re like most, you originally wanted a website to allow yet another avenue of contact — one that runs 24/7 — and to make yourself known on the World Wide Web. To provide yet another public-facing side of your company. A passive offering more than likely. It’s quite likely you’re still after these very things.
This Is Now
There’s nothing wrong with these desires, but while just having a website once used to be enough, it takes more than passivity to succeed nowadays. Assuming, that is, you want to attract and inform new customers. If your plans for your site include nothing more than serving existing customers you needn’t worry, but let’s face it, most want something more. After all, costs were incurred during the site’s creation, and hosting, while it’s not expensive, isn’t free, either. A return on investment (ROI) is sort of expected by most.
According to Netcraft there are 235,890,526 sites on the web and the number is increasing rapidly (as of May, 2009). This is up from 168,408,112 recorded in May of 2008. This is significant growth and it effectively dilutes the web. Unless you’ve made your mark already, you now have to work a bit to achieve a decent ROI, assuming again a desire to attract new people. What was once potent may now be less if you haven’t pulled any new tricks out of the bag in a few years. Like starting a blog, for example.
Quality Content Needed
While there are many ways to improve a site’s standing — including some less than ethical methods we won’t get into — there’s no need to get super tricky. We will fall back to something we mentioned before: a blog. That’s another name for a web log and it’s something we use here and it’s something used on our mother company’s biocontrol and IPM site. It’s a publishing platform and a blog is a simple self-controlled means of constant communication with your site’s visitors. You author articles, stories, testimonials, whatever. Whatever’s appropriate to your business. It’s honest work, but very rewarding if done right.
Remember this: Every time you make a new entry and publish something — or “make a post” as some call it — you effectively offer the GoogleBot and other search engine crawlers (spiders) a whole new page with a whole new indexable title to add to search. If you format your title element (what you see on the top of your browser bar) content title before site name as we do, and offer a good description, without doing anything else you can have an effective means of being found on the web. It’s honest work, though, as said. Now with emphasis on work. In other words, if you want to really make the most of your site/blog, you have to make sure you not only publish regularly, it should be good stuff.
At one time it was enough just to have a site with a few keywords (which are no longer used by Google and others) and that was it. The web has matured some. Once “Free Stuff” used to draw visitors in numbers, now they want something more. People want quality in some way shape or form. It can be quality of news or information, quality of variety and choice, quality of interaction and communication, a quality of relevance, or it can be the quality of novelty. It’s subjective, but the fact is visitors now want something. Give it to them. Doing so will draw relevant links from various sources across the web. And the more it happens the more it’ll grow. It’s solid growth.
Real-World Example
Let’s have an example: A restaurant has a site with a blog. So far so good. Each new entry will have a properly formed title element and custom description (view the source on this page to see what we mean). Check. Now it’s time to make regular quality entries. This is where many people get stuck. Writer’s block. Well, a restaurant will probably want to publish specials (and will have a blog “category” for such). They will likely want to mention events, be it ladies night or regular reminders about the buffet. Or maybe they want to use it to draw a crowd for the next band. That’s all fine and good, but if you want to really utilize your site effectively, you can do more.
Using the restaurant as an example, publishing content such as wine reviews, recipes, and cooking tips, mixed in with all that other self-promotional stuff suddenly gives value to the content Google is adding to the pile. Doing this sort of thing regularly might encourage other sites to provide in-bound links, and since this would be occurring naturally, so to speak, as a result of offering widely useful content, it is tremendously valuable. The value comes from a search algorithm’s method of gauging relevance (shown as page rank).
Coming Up The Ranks
The more sites that link in to a site naturally, without exchanges and that sort of thing, the higher the site’s relevance is assumed. As a result of this assumption, the site will enjoy better placement in the results, even if they’re effectively identical. Take two pages with identical titles, descriptions, and content, with the only exception being page rank. The site with the higher page rank is going to be assumed to be more relevant and since search engines want to give searchers the best, most accurate results possible, they will present the more “relevant” site before the other. The span between them can be number in pages at times so this is important.
You may not be interested in any of this. If you just want another way for your customers to find your number, in case they lose the refrigerator magnet, then you should ignore it. It does depend on your goals. If, however, you want to be found and really make your mark on the web, it will take some honest work, and some time allowing for all this to happen. You will want to post at least once-a-month, and regardless of trade, preferably more. Once- or twice-a-week is pretty good in most cases. It does depend on your ability to create these offerings, and the nature of your offering and of your business. Something like headline news, for example, would best be served with multiple entries being published on any given day. You decide what’s best for you, then do it.
If you know your current and potential customers you will know what they value. Give it to them and you may find they can give something back.