You can’t really get around it, building a website is one of the most important aspects about making money online. Technical knowhow is no longer a stumbling block with tools to make the whole process quite painless, yet it is something that many people find difficult and confusing.
However, just because the tools are readily available, it can often be difficult to know how to build a strong website.
Here are a few key points to consider and focus on when you are building a website that can help to set you up for success it and make it more appealing to new visitors.
What Do You Want To Achieve?
The very first step of building a good website is knowing what you actually want to do with the website.
After all, there are many different types of websites out there and people often have very different reasons for developing a website.
One example of this is a personal blog site, where a person blogs about things that matter to them. For this type of site, writers often don’t try to get traffic, and will develop the site around personal preferences, rather than their audience.
In contrast, someone developing a niche site with the aim to make money online will have much more focus on traffic and audience experience. There are many ways of doing this, starting with using the appearance and formatting of the site to draw users to particular aspects that you consider most important.
Site Appearance
The way a website looks is a critical component of its strength and how successful it is likely to be.
When it comes to appearance, perhaps the most important thing to consider is how easy it is to read and follow.
I have seen many websites with really beautiful backgrounds, lots of images and many different types of fonts. The problem with stacking all those elements onto a website it becomes really difficult to actually read the text.
As a general rule, people who search the web often don’t tend to have a lot of patience and will quickly click away from a site that’s difficult or hard to read.
Because of this, websites with plain backgrounds and easy to read fonts normally work best. This doesn’t mean that images can’t be used, far from it, but the right images and where they are placed on your site need to be carefully considered.
An extension of this is to be aware of how the website looks on different devices, different browsers and at different resolutions.
There are many differences in the computers and devices that people use to access the internet, and if you’re not careful you can end up with a website that looks fantastic on some computers and is almost unreadable on others. So be sure to check your site in all Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers.
Appearance also extends to any content that you write.
People are very intolerant of errors in formatting or spelling, even if these errors are minor and don’t happen very often. So pay pay careful attention to what you write and whether it makes sense in terms of spelling and grammar.
User Experience Optimization
This brings me to my next point – A buddy of mine was chatting to me in the WA forum about UEO and I really found the subject enlightening. Our websites should be focused on what works best for the reader, rather than for us.
This is an important thought process and one that people tend not to take seriously, however a little time spent thinking as your readers can reap huge benefits.
One example of this is to make it easy for readers to navigate around your site. This means that you don’t want to make it difficult for your readers to find posts or to work out where to look for posts.
Categories and tags can help a lot with these, and these start to become essential as websites get bigger. After all – no one wants to sift through 374 blog posts to find one that is relevant to what they are interested in… Do you?
Maybe the most important aspect of building a positive user experience is having content on the page and the site that are actually relevant to the needs of the reader, and deliver on the title.
For example, many new to affiliate marketing build sites jump straight in where the only thing they do is try to sell products and services – just to get a commision. This approach can often result in a temporary swell of traffic to the site, but it gives readers no incentive to actually revisit the site. Mixing your reviews with actionable useful content will yield better results in the long run.
The best websites provide content that engages their readers and offers useful information. This may well be a review on a product, but it could also be advice on how to do something specific or a discussion about some new information you found on another website.
Really, there are tons of different types of useful content that you can provide for website visitors, largely depending on the niche of website and the type of audience that you are trying to attract.
It is also important to make sure that your website actually works like it is supposed to. A large number of broken links on any website is a violation of Google Webmaster quality guidelines. Your site may be penalized for having a bad structure and you may lose organic rankings for your content. Keep a check on this with a broken link checker plugin.
When I see errors like this on a website it often suggest to me the website isn’t being maintained very, and that also means people aren’t very likely to stick around.
Are You In The Search Results?
A final important part of building a strong website is using SEO and using it well.
For those that don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and focuses on getting websites to rank on search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Bing and even YouTube.
While SEO sounds complex, it isn’t as bad as it seems and there is a lot of training out there for how to do SEO in todays online environment. Effective use of SEO can help a website to attract readers, and this can be critical – especially for people who are trying to make money from their websites for free.
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