The work you do to publicise your website in order to get visitors should be part of a long term strategy. You should carefully consider the options that are offered to you and decide on the ethics and tangible benefits before committing to any form of advertising...

1) Search Engine Relevancy:

Do you know what the most popular search terms are used to find your kind product or service? Have you written your website copy so that these search terms are relevant? Modern search engines use complex information retrieval algorithms to analyse websites and determine the relevancy of each page. This is based on many factors, but primarily:

1. How easily can the search engines untangle the text from the HTML mark-up, the images and the tables, and make sense of what is actual said on each page
2. How easily can the search engines identify the grammar in the text, determine the subject, verb and object, and the local context, and then calculate the relevancy of a given keyword given that context
3. How easily can the search engines define the well formed and structured text and how the relevancy is supported using synonyms and semantic referencing within the given context

2) Search Engine Saturation:

Do you know how many of your web pages each of the search engines have indexed? Do you have individual titles and meta data that describes each page? Do you supply additional information to help the search engines categorise your pages?

Getting high page positioning on the search engines using pay-per-click can be a very expensive way of achieving the visibility you desire. By being smart with the information you provide to the search engines, your website could get highly ranked in the natural listings and consequently reduce your required investment in pay-per-click advertising.

3) Link Popularity:

Link popularity is the measure of the number of references to your website that are found on the internet. Websites will gain popularity by getting indexed in search engines, publishing it in various directories, and advertising it in online published media.

Ultimately your popularity score is, in absolute terms, the only true indicator of how successful your website is compared with any other website.

4) Quality of links from high PageRank websites:

Popularity is also determined by the quality of the source of the inbound link. Links from high PageRank websites are favoured more highly than low PageRank websites. Hence obtaining links from more popular websites will increase the popularity of your own website.

5) Sitemap:

You should have a clear and up to date site map on your website. This will help to ensure that the search engines index all the pages on your website you want to be indexed. A sitemap will also improve your link popularity to your sub-pages on your website.

6) Relevant Link Text:

Any inbound links to your website should be in context and highlight its relevancy by using the desired keywords as part of the link text. The actual hyperlink should also be surrounded by appropriate sentences to give the link additional relevancy.

7) Newsfeeds and blogs:

Publishing newsfeeds and blogs will increase your popularity as most search engines will index these feeds. What’s more, the number of subscribers to your newsfeeds will mean more traffic to your website.

Summary

Here at Business Web Factory, we have created a questionnaire based on the web design essentials listed below. We encourage you to complete the questionnaire if you already have a website.

Download the Design Questionnaire here

Call to Action

Why not compare your score with your favourite websites to help you identify areas for improvement?