Your Website: Not Just Another Pretty Face
August 5th, 2008 Dina at Wordfeeder.comDo you ever wonder, “What the heck did I spend all this money and time designing a website for?”
The whole point in having a website is to be FOUND by those who are ALREADY LOOKING for what you’ve got. Webmasters don’t create sites to be “pretty” (although an attractively designed website is NEVER a bad thing!). We create them:
1. to drive traffic TO the pages from Google and the other search engines, and
2. to use cues such as “sign up now!” or “become a member” as a means of corralling in a continuous stream of leads.
A huge part of marketing your website is picking ONE key search term and then optimizing your site for that term. If your webmaster initially does a good job of building and search optimizing your basic site of, say, 8 or 10 pages, you’ll probably soon be seeing yourself coming up on page 7 for your main search term.
In order to bring your site up to Page 1 for that search term, this is what you’d have to do over time:
1. Constantly write new articles around your topic of interest.
2. Publish EACH article on ONE new website page. At the end of the article, tell the reader, again, to SIGN UP for our mailing list! (make sure each page ALWAYS has your key search terms in the TOP HEADER title and meta keywords, headlines and bolded subheads).
(Keep reading, every step of this is important.)
3. Link to the article page(s) from a list of links in the main Articles page of the site (You should always have a page in your main navigation that’s entitled “Articles”).
4. Continue to “advertise” the newly posted articles (AND LINK TO THEM) on the FRONT PAGE of your website and also the SIDEBARS if you’ve designed to allow for this.
If you kept up with diligently publishing new article pages, making sure you’ve optimized for your main search terms, your visibility would climb from page 7 to page 5 to page 3 and so forth until your site finally reaches page 1 of Google. The higher you rise on Google, the more visitors will come to your site to read about (whatever it is that you are an expert in), and the more signups you’ll get from people interested in learning more.
I’m a copywriter, I know other copywriters, and yes, one of my functions is getting web articles written and published for my copywriting clients. But it doesn’t matter to me who you use for this purpose - as long as it gets done on a REGULAR basis.
Publishing new pages to your site is VERY important. Having a blog that drives visitors to the site (via LINKS) and then gets you new signups every day is even better!
Often, after I’m finished helping a client build and launch their website, I notice they go into this retractive phase. They’ve just parted with a good chunk of change, they can SEE their website live, and they think, “Well, it’s done and it’s STILL not bringing me scads of clients. I guess this doesn’t work, and I’m not investing any more money into this nonsense.”
YES, it will WORK. But it takes time and regular effort, same as anything else would if you want to do it right.
Whatever you do, DON’T lose sight of the whole purpose of having a website in the first place. “The computers” can “read” those keywords that your webmaster carefully places in the headers and metatags of your web pages. Each time you add a new page to your site that contains the “right” buzz words in the “right” places, you get MORE visibility for THAT term.
For some reason, it’s really challenging to sink into people’s heads that it’s all about ONE OR TWO carefully chosen terms and no more. For example: my site is targeted for the word “copywriting” as well as some variations on that term which I researched using the Google Keyword Tool. Sure, I would LIKE to also attract people who search for the words “freelance writer.” But if I started to build pages optimized for that term, I’d quickly lose rank for my other term which was copywriter.
The same goes for your site - unfortunately, you can’t get results if you bet on every single term. You’ll find that you get many more leads who have been to Google actively SEEKING what you sell, if you target ONLY those words, instead of going for every possible term you can think of.
Another way of saying it:
I’m going to do MUCH better if I publish 12 pages optimized for the topic of copywriting, than if I look up 12 different ways to say “copywriting” and publish one page per term.
Make sense?
The web is ideal for people who want to NARROW their niche, because if you do it right, your site will attract the attention of ONLY people who want what you have. And that’s the whole point, right? After all - why would you want traffic coming in from people who aren’t interested in what you’re selling? Sure, Paris Hilton might be a hot search term, but are the people who’re looking her up likely interested in what you’ve got to say? My guess is no.
Remember:
1. Narrow down your search terms
2. Start publishing optimized pages
3. Build your list
4. Connect with your audience
For a price quote on a website development job, content publishing, or editing, contact dina@wordfeeder.com.
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