Keep Your Website Current, Boost Your Business

Joel Goldstein, Author of Start From Success, contributed this article to BusinessNewsDaily's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

When you are trying to grow a business with Internet marketing, building a web site is the easy part. Developing and maintaining an audience requires time and effort — and because of this, many websites often become stagnant.

Increasing your website traffic may be time-consuming, but search engine optimization today is primarily focused around providing a great experience for the visitors to your website. The stagnancy that often occurs on company websites is also their greatest downfall in attracting visitors — Google wants to know that you are investing time in creating a helpful, informative, user-centered website. Although you may not have time to do it yourself, as a business owner you know what your potential customers are looking for and what questions they are most likely to ask. You can use this information, as well as these “best practices” tips, to improve your website and increase your traffic over time.

Loading Times
Cluttered designs often lead to slow loading times, which can deter site visitors from staying on the page. Choose clean page layouts and features that don’t use clunky or outdated code. If your website doesn’t load fast enough, your visitors may click away to continue their search and find another page.

Relevant Content
You know what your customers are curious about and what they need to make their lives easier. Use that knowledge to create your website content — articles, videos and photos that teach them new information and help them find what they are looking for.   

Guest Contributions
If your blog or video library is getting a little stale, invite other people in your industry to contribute a guest post or video.

Connection Opportunities
If you want your website’s visitors to return on a regular basis, make it easy for them to connect with you. Use your sidebar or pop-up registration pages to encourage all visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feed, or connect with you on social media.

Gifts and Giveaways
Special incentives can also be helpful in encouraging return traffic. Offer web-only promotions, coupons, contests or gift items that might be useful or interesting for your audience. 

Internal Links
Setting up a good internal link structure can help to boost your rankings with Google and encourage users to explore more of the website. Look over each page for opportunities to link pages together in the content of the site.

Landing Pages
If you create a landing page for a specific product or service, keep your messaging simple and to the point. Focus your content on the one action you want visitors to take after viewing the page.

Sharing Options
Add a social sharing button to your website, blog and email newsletters to make it easy for your existing readers to pass your content along.

Relevant Keywords
When choosing keywords for search engine optimization think about what your clients might be searching for in Google. Then scatter variations of those key words or phrases occasionally throughout your content. 

New and Improved
Most importantly, update small pieces of your website regularly, to keep your customers and/or readers coming back for more. 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.