When starting a new website, whether you are designing it yourself or someone else is doing it for you, there are some important things you need to know to help your new website maximise it’s search ranking and therefore, exposure to potential clients.
- Only about 10 websites will show up on page one of a search and only one site can rank in first place.
- Great looking websites often rank poorly. Search engines can not tell how appealing a website is, they primarily look at content and site structure.
- You should aim to have your website rank on page one on at least one search criteria. Ranking on page one will effectively give your site respect and greater exposure to potential clients.
- Passive websites will require you to market them with advertising to increase your exposure. This will cost you.
- Active and dynamic websites, if done well, will sell themselves and save you money.
- An active and dynamic website is all about well written content. When search engines crawl your website, they will in no particular order be looking at:
- Your site structure and how well it is optimised for search engines.
- Number of pages and quality and relevancy of page content.
- Frequency of updating, particularly blogging.
- Page load speed.
- How many other sites are linking to you and the quality of those links.
- How long has the domain name and website been active by the current user/website.
- For a typical average website, traffic will mainly come from:
- Google Search 70%
- Returning visitors 10%
- Referral Traffic 10%
- Other search engines 10%
Getting your website indexed and optimised for Google is one of the biggest factors affecting the success of your website. If you are active in promoting your website, then Referral traffic will increase from inbound links and your ranking will improve. Stop promoting your site and it will go backwards.
