Top Steps to a Better Website
Trying to work out why you aren’t appearing in Google results? Here’s some quick and easy tips on how to enhance performance, which will ultimately help you get closer to page 1 of Google results. Whether you’re an author, blogger, retailer, services or any other type of website, these Top Steps to a Better Website are going to apply to you.
Warning – any company who guarrantees you a number spot on Google’s page 1 is lying. Companies pay millions for this and wait patiently while many, many factors come into play. It takes time…
1 – Excellent Quality Content
Oh yeah, you’ve heard this before a dozen million times (bad English?) but it is true. Why would anyone browsing the billions of websites stop at yours? Read your blog out loud, get close friends to read it, post it on Social Media etc… and if you can’t get anyone to read it, then stop trying to plug it. Unless your content solves a problem – yes, people use Google to solve their problems – then nobody wants to know about it. Trying to sell something? Then your keywords must be relevant to them or they will skip on by.
2 – A Great Looking Website
Live within your means – if you can’t afford much, then do the best you can. However, look at your website aesthetics from a viewer’s point of view and determine whether it looks amazing. Check your competition out, if theirs is better then they’ll get your traffic. Be smart with your money, it’s amazing what you can get for very little to no dollars spent. Research what others are doing and follow them. Look at awesome examples of WordPress websites which can cost you nothing.
3 – A Fast Loading Website
It takes a looooooong time to work out how to speed up your website, but to save you a lot of heart-ache, and if you’re on WordPress, then you might want to check out this guy’s steps which saved me a lot of time and improved the performance of my website by 1000% – I’m not even kidding. Google rewards websites that load fast (under 4s) and if yours is any slower than this, Google will be less likely to send traffic your way, as it diminishes the User Experience (UX). Even if you’re not on WordPress, you will need to have a full health check done to determine what to speed up. Things like images – need compression, caching improvements – there are literally thousands of things that you can do to speed up your website. Use these tools to determine your website’s speed:
https://gtmetrix.com/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
4 – And Now I’m Found
Keywords. Especially long tail keywords. Use them wisely and effectively. If you don’t have a Google Adwords account (you can get away with using it free and never having to pay a cent) then you are never, ever, ever going to be able to attract visitors your way. An example of long tail keywords is, “Where can I buy red high heels in London” – if you sell red high heels and are based in London, you should use this long tail keyword. Go and Google the difference between a keyword and a long tail keyword, however, if you don’t know, there’s your answer as to why you aren’t getting any visitors to your website.
5 – Hi Google
Let Google know you exist quickly. You need to have Google Webmaster Tools setup and your domain added to it. Every time you write a blog post, add it to Google Webmaster. Don’t know what Google Webmaster is? Oh boy…you’d better get cracking. This is super important. Every page or post must be submitted to Google’s search engines if you ever have a hope of ranking highly in search engines.
6 – Social Media
Social Media is good for exposure and to build a profile however, it isn’t (with some exceptions) a great place to sell your products. It is a great way to drive traffic to your website and hopefully, your website will promote whatever it is you’re trying to promote. Don’t spam people on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, Social Media is supposed to be, um, social? So stop trying to ruin other’s experience by trying to put your product in front of them every minute of every day. It’s stupid and will do nothing except get you unfollowed. So unless you’re Coca Cola, I’d refrain from reminding people that they haven’t yet purchased your red high heels (even if they’re on the other side of the world).
Make sure you use Google Plus (g+). Yes, I agree, it is the poor man’s facebook but… think of it this way, it is GOOGLE’s poor man’s facebook. So if you’re not using it, then do you think Google will reward you in page rankings?
7 – SEO – Search Engine Optimization
SEO – ahhhhh. Love it or hate it, without it, you don’t exist. It means exactly that, Search Engine Optimization. You need to do many, many things to your website in order for it to be good enough to be even seen by a website such as Google. You need to do things like, well…all the steps on this page for a start should be all part of your SEO plan. Let me give you a clue as to how you can rank to number 1 for a particular page…LONG TAIL KEYWORDS.
Social Media helps by adding extra links and content (as well as keywords) that point to your site.
8 – Weeee a Sandbox
No, this Sandbox is no fun. There’s a conflict on the internet about whether or not a Google Sandbox is real. Doesn’t matter, what is important is that a website that is less than 12 months old, has low domain age, so therefore, is going to rank very low regardless. The Sandbox is a mythical or hypothetical place that is supposed to be where new websites are confined to when they are first born. In this rumored Sandbox, websites take the time to grow up and become healthy, fast, well-informing websites that finally deserve to be put out in the world.
The point I’m making? It takes time for a website to start ranking. 85% of websites never will – some are abandoned because people give up and others just don’t have caretakers who know what to do to get the right exposure. It can take you years to get search engine traffic. Want to sit around and wait? Sure, go for it. Just don’t expect any website traffic. Follow these steps and you’ll improve your rankings.
9 – Talk a Lot
Unless you have in the region of 50 – 100 blogs already written, then don’t expect any traffic. Also, unless you’re prepared to write at the very minimum – 1 blog a week, then you will literally take years to start getting website traffic. My advice? Write at least 2 blogs a week. If you don’t already have an arsenal of 100 blogs on your website, then start writing one a day. I’m not kidding. This is how the real world of Google traffic works.
Can’t be bothered? Don’t have the time? Outsource it. There are plenty of writers out there who are willing to write your blog posts for you. Comment below and I just might send you a few good writers. The things to remember is, related content. If you’re writing books about prostitution and drugs, then blog a lot about areas within that. If like me, you have a background in IT, you therefore understand that even providing Top Steps to a Better Website is a benefit and considered related content.
If you don’t have a lot of blogs, products with excellent SEO then you are never going to get organic natural traffic.
Here’s some don’ts:
Do not use a dodgy (Fiverr) SEO company who promises to provide you with top Google results in x number of months. You’ll end up being blacklisted by Google instead.
Don’t start a website and expect that it will magically attract visitors unless you’re Rihanna or Brexit.
Don’t write a book, sell a product or service(s) on websites like Amazon and expect that they will sell it for you. I sell most of my books through this very website.
An Example
I wrote a short story called A Boy Called Q and I made it free on Amazon and Smashwords. A handfull of people downloaded it until I wrote this post – New Gay Themed Book Causes a Stir. And I of course, followed my own Top Steps to a Better Website article by applying everything I know to my post.
What did I do?
- I created an excellent catchy headline
- I Tweeted, I Bookfaced it, Google Plussed it, Insta’d it
- I performed hours of research using tools such as Google Adwords to determine what would be highly searched long tail keywords that had low competition and I used those long tail keywords
- I wrote an interesting article about the book and that gave me extra Google credits
It is downloading a lot more now, in fact, I quadrupled the downloads of that free book.
I hope my Top Steps to a Better Website helps you. I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments. Also, please take a few seconds to download A Boy Called Q. You never know, you might like this short story.
Extra free tip to anyone that’s made it this far…every time you go to a website and see that the comments are open, USE it as an opportunity for marketing. It amazes me that dozens – sometimes hundreds – of people read my articles, yet don’t comment. I don’t mean spam your shit there, I mean…put in a helpful, thankful, nice comment and LINK back to your website. The more links around the world from various websites you have that link back to you…more SEO Google credits.
Fox
Good tips thanks i will add this to my website i’m building