In this series of Creating Effective Websites we’ve looked at how to improve your web strategy, how to create quality content, and how to make the site usable to all users. In this fourth installment we’ll evaluate how well your website is marketed online.
 
The internet is a vast ocean, with literally millions of sites, and thousands more being generated all day every day. It’s important that you can reach your target demographic, and stand out from the noise. Improving your Internet reach can result in more quality traffic from search engines, and generate more business from your website. Effective Internet Marketing is a highly competitive industry, with constant innovation and improvements to best practices. Here are a few things you should pay attention to make your site stand out and for your customers to find you:
 

Analytics

Tom Venuto (fitness instructor) says you can’t improve what you can’t measure. How will you know if you’re getting better results with different strategies if you don’t have a metric for what a “win” looks like? Web analytics is the measurement of visitor behavior on a website for the purpose of improving that website. TV ratings are very nebulous, and a small portion of the population is polled, and they attempt to extrapolate viewer habits from that subsample. Fortunately web traffic is much more scientific and easy to measure. Your web server keeps a log of every single time your website is accessed, and lots of information can be mined from these logs; how long a user stayed on your site, what pages they visited, and what they searched for to find your site. All very valuable information.
 

Freshness

We talked about this in the Quality Content article, but having fresh content is extremely important, because it boosts your ratings with search engines. When they scan your site they look at the dates on individual files and blog posts. If nothing new has been posted, they drop you lower in the rankings because people using their search features are expecting current information. Make sure you’re staying up to date with what’s happening in your field or industry, and keeping that information updated on your site.
 

Search Engine Results

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a little like voodoo. Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.) change their algorithms regularly which determine what makes a site list higher in their rankings. So when building a site, be sure to partner with someone who keeps up to date on the latest best practices. But for all the small tricks and tips available for SEO, it will always boil down to this: quality, fresh content with well-chosen titles and descriptions for each page will always increase the traffic to your site.
 

Social Media

If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance you’re personally on Facebook or twitter or Instagram, etc. because Social Media has become a huge part of our society. If you’re still using MySpace you’re beyond help! There’s a reason is valued at $8.4 billion because social media is the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth, which is by far the best kind of advertising there is. Social media is increasingly displacing search as the primary means of reaching and promoting websites. When people are buzzing about your site online, it brings tremendous visibility and growth.
 

Why Does Reach Matter?

In a survey which polled 175 CMOs from various Business to Customer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) industries, 74% believed they could tie social media efforts to hard ROI this year.
 
Bit-Wizards is a company you can rely on to help you get the best search engine results, and to reach the most amount of visitors. Let us know if we can help!