If you’re a would-be web developer or maybe just tinkering around starting your own blog, the end game is the same…you want your site to be successful.
You put many hard hours into it so you want to ensure it not only looks great, functions well, but of course you want people to visit your website.
Here are 20 tips that can turn any website or blog into an online success, and you’ll kick yourself when you know how easy they are to do!…..
1 Customize your homepage
This is one of the most important tips I can offer. Your homepage is like your shopfront, so you want it to look nice, but you also want plenty of functionality that it easy to use.
If you’re a DIY web designer, you’ve most likely started with a theme, possibly even one of the really basic free themes that comes installed with WordPress. While themes are an easy way to create a site fast, they don’t really offer your visitors anything.
Change the homepage so that it reflects your business or the message you want to get across to your audience. If you’re selling something, make sure it is one of the first things your visitor sees, instead of making them scroll to find it. Ensure you have some good call-to-action elements, such as clickable images, buttons that direct the visitor to a particular page, or even an email marketing list to get them onto your mailing list the moment they visit your site.
First work out a strategy you want to take, with the end goal in mind, and then work your design to suit.
2. Create a strong Admin password
One of the biggest mistakes a WordPress website owner can make is calling the Admin password ‘Admin’. Bots frequent website logins and it is the first username they will try. To prevent your site from getting hacked, always ensure your password is strong and unique, and doesn’t relate to your own name, your website domain name or what you sell. And also I recommend keeping your password at least 12 characters long. I use 30 for all my own passwords! If you can’t remember your super-strong password, I recommend downloading a password app such as One Password to maintain them for you.
3. Set up Google Analytics
You want visitors to your site, so the first thing to do is know how many you are getting, where they are coming from and what they are clicking on. Google Analytics is super-easy to setup in WordPress by simply adding a plugin, or cut and paste the analytics code from your account into your WordPress theme. You’ll find Google Analytics can provide you with a whole lot of great data about your visitors, including gender, interests, age, how they found your site, which pages they visited, how long they were on your site and where they viewed the site from, and thats just the basics! You can view the flow chart to see where visitors dropped off, allowing you to edit your site to either capture them to your mailing list or improve the page to make people stay longer.
4. Add images in rows.
Adding images to your website does a lot more for your site than just make it look nice. It also has great SEO value to your site. Say for example you have text on your page and it’s not a huge page you may find the time spent on the page is only a few seconds. from the data fed to Google it may be inclined to think at your page isn’t worth reading if people don’t stick around. Adding a row of images under the text means people are more likely to scroll and spend a little extra time viewing the images, thus reducing your bounce-rate. The other purpose the images serve is for the search engines. Before adding the images make sure you name them correctly. For example, if you have an image of the ropes on a boat for your boating supplies store, make sure you name the images something like large_boat_ropes.jpg This will tell Google exactly what the image is about and you may find that when someone searches for the content on your page, the image will appear in the search results, standing out beyond your competitors.
5. Commenting on Articles
Wordpress has a default set into it that allows visitors to leave a comment on your blog post pages. This makes your site more sociable if you respond back to your audience. the downside however is that the comments box will get bots and SEO companies trying to hijack the comments box to use to drive up their backlinks. You can overcome this though and still keep the comments, but changing the comments box to a Facebook comments box. This will also help increase your social media following, while dissing the spammers at the same time.
6. Excerpt text
In WordPress you may have seen the area allowing you to add excerpt text to each article. This is a brief description of your post for your audience to know what you are writing about, but it also asists in your ranking.
7 Search Engine Optimisation
Getting your site ranking is obviously one of the biggest areas to ensure online success, and this means you need to optimise the site for the search engines.
There are a few steps involved to optimise your site, but one of the simplest and most effective ways is to start by installing the Yoast SEO plugin in your site.The plugin is free, and gives additional functionality to your website to let you add a title to each post, description and also keywords and tags. Ensure they reflect each article you post, and most important, each article is 100% organic content for your site.
8 BackUp
There is nothing worse than building a great site, spending hours adding the content, and then lose it all due to a broken plugin or something else. It can be very easily avoided by adding a Backup Plugin into the site, and automate it to store the last couple of backups every week.
