Launching a website today is a very different prospect to just a few years ago. The rules are constantly changing, and what works for website owners one year will almost certainly be out of date by the time the next decade rolls around. Just because you were able to launch a successful website back in the noughties, that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to cut it now as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.
Fortunately, we have compiled a list of tips that any website owner can use in order to boost their chances of getting noticed and building an audience as quickly as possible. Some of these techniques will be new to many webmasters, but others are tried and tested techniques that will always be applicable.
Target the Right Keywords
Search engine optimization techniques target websites in Google, Yahoo and Bing. However, given Google’s dominance in the search engine sector, the vast majority of SEO professionals will focus exclusively on optimizing for Google. Needless to say, if getting to the number one spot on Google’s results pages was simply a case of paying an SEO expert or deploying some easily replicable techniques, everyone one would be doing it and the top spot would constantly be shifting.
In practice, only the biggest websites and businesses will ever be able to realistically compete for top billing against some search terms. However, if small businesses and websites get creative and target the right search terms, they can take advantage of areas where their larger competitors have been lax.
There is a plethora of tools out there for conducting keyword research, so use these to your advantage. The more you know about your target keywords and your competitors’ own efforts, the more effectively you will be able to fight back.
Start a Newsletter
A newsletter might sound like quite an old-fashioned tool to use, but it is one that still has enormous potential today when used properly. Of course, you aren’t going to be able to start a newsletter if you don’t have a list of contacts to send that newsletter to. Building such a list of contacts should therefore be one of your first priorities after you first launch your website.
The quickest way of building up an appreciable mailing list for your newsletter is to simply start producing high-quality content as soon as you possibly can. If you are able to naturally build a consistent readership, you will find that a growing number of users will happily hand their contact details over to you.
You don’t need a massive contacts list before you begin sending out your newsletter. In fact, doing so when you have a relatively low number of sign-ups can help you to foster a strong sense of loyalty among the early adopters of your website.
Once you are up and running, this guide on how to make a newsletter is an excellent starting point for learning how to craft the kind of newsletters that are going to help your website to grow in the long-term.
Get Your Own Domain and Hosting
The fact that anyone who wants to make and publish their own website is now able to do so is definitely a victory for the internet as a whole. However, as you can probably work out for yourself, the free services that will enable you to build and publish a website without having to spend any money on it come with some serious caveats that need to be acknowledged. First and foremost, you will always be at the mercy of the whims of your chosen provider – if they decide that your website isn’t accessible anymore, then you have no recourse should they choose to shut it down.
It is much better, not to mention much more professional, to pay for your own domain name and hosting service for your website. Whether you spend the money on a professional web designer is up to you. A professional designer can produce something bespoke for you, a unique website crafted specifically for your business. However, the proliferation of platforms like WordPress means that any patient user can learn to put together their own professional-looking websites.
Update Regularly and Consistently
One of the most important things to do in order to grow a brand-new website is to ensure that you are regularly adding new content to it. You should aim to publish your content according to a reliable schedule so your regular readers know when to check back to see what’s new. Getting into a regular schedule early on will help your website significantly as it continues to grow.
Getting a new website noticed is rarely easy, especially if you’ve never had to launch your own site before. However, with the right approach, any website has the potential to spread far and wide and attract a large audience.
