A Surefire Formula for a Successful Website: The New Webmaster's Strategy

Ten years ago, running a successful website used to be extremely easy. The only major hurdle laid in website designing and development which required either a fortune or plenty of hard work. If the site was designed by the webmaster himself, then the only cost incurred would be the cost of hosting the website. Along with this, website maintenance also required a bit of administrative tasks such as monitoring the files to ensure that all scripts were functioning correctly. The search engines were in their infancy, so it was pretty easy to gain a top ranking. All that was required was a tweaking of certain parameters within the webpage to optimize it for the search engines. Furthermore, the initial content created for the website used to be more than enough to keep the site performing well within the search engine results. A sustained traffic from the search engines was almost guaranteed, consequently the money would keep rolling. To sum up, the basic formula for a successful web business at that time used to be "set and forget".

That was then and this is now. Running a successful website has become an extremely tedious task these days, and is much more than registering a domain name, hosting it, and submitting it to the search engines. You will see a fierce challenge from competing websites no matter what sector of the industry you choose to build your new website around. People are getting used to an extremely high level of functionality, so the more scripts you deploy on your website for making their lives easier, the better it would be for your business in the long run. The infrequent website management chores are no longer enough in order to make a sustained income from the World Wide Web. Lazy webmasters have indeed become a thing of the past. All the major search engines including the search engine giant Google have incorporated several criteria into their ranking algorithm in order to determine which sites should be placed high on the search results page. One of the most important criteria is how much fresh content as well as regularly updated content a website generates.

The income levels from your website are directly dependent on the amount of traffic that your site receives. Traffic is the lifeblood of your business, without which it would wither and die soon. You need to attract as many targeted visitors to your site as possible. If you have a look at the statistics program you have deployed to monitor your traffic (there are many that you can use such as Webalizer, AWStats, Google Analytics etc), you'll see that a major portion of your traffic comes only from the search engines, of which Google is the most prominent one. Depending on your business sector, this percentage may lie anywhere between 70 - 85%, provided your site has not been penalized by Google. Only a tiny percentage of your traffic will be direct traffic, i.e. people who actually type your site's domain name or click on your URL from their bookmarks. As far as your links on other websites are concerned, the percentage of traffic from such links would also be no more than 5 to 10%.

Today, one of the surefire formulas for getting a sustained stream of visitors to your website is by publishing useful content, as frequently as you can. Yes, you do need a handsome number of incoming links to your site in order to rank higher for your targeted keywords that you used as the anchor text. However, what is much more important after you have gained a few hundred incoming links is the frequency with which you publish new content and update existing one. The best practice would be writing at least one article for your site per day. You must have heard the well-known idiom "an apple a day, keeps the doctor away". Creating useful content on a daily basis is exactly synonymous with this, "an article a day, keeps loss in rankings away". This is not mere theory, you can actually experience it. Write an article for your site every day for seven days, and at the end of the week you are guaranteed to see a significant boost in your Google rankings.

However, there is one major obstacle to creating useful content on a regular basis. You need ideas. Ideas are indeed the most difficult to generate when you don't have knowledge about the subject at hand. Hence it is important that you equip yourself with as much knowledge as you can about your business sector. Your mind will only be able to generate new ideas if you read articles and new content on other websites. There is also an easier alternative to it, you can read an article elsewhere and rephrase it so that the search engines would regard it as new content. However this technique is not very much useful for establishing your recognition as an expert within your field. This is because although search engines cannot tell the difference between an original article and a rewritten one, your actual human visitors can. And your business depends on the decisions of your real human visitors, not the search engines. If they do not see much value in your site's content, they are not very likely to make a buying decision.

Stale content is no longer the call of the day. This can also be witnessed by the fact that the search engine bots tend to visit those sites more frequently that have something new to offer. You can also easily observe this from your stats program that the frequently updated pages of your site tend to be crawled more often. You may already be aware that all search engines work in a similar fashion, they crawl new content and then cache or index it. When a surfer searches for a keyword, the index is searched for relevance to the query, and the most relevant webpages are returned within a fraction of a second. If you publish new content or update existing content less frequently, your pages will get crawled and entered into the index less frequently as well. The result is that your new content may take weeks or even months to appear in the search engine results.

Finally, merely attracting traffic to your site is not enough to achieve your business goals. You also need to convert that traffic into customers eager to buy. This not only depends on how compelling your sales copy is, but also on the experience of the visitors on your site. You can make your visitor's experience a pleasant one by ensuring that your website is hosted on a fast web hosting server. Your stats program can also show you the length of time that your visitors stay on your website. The longer that a visitor stays, the greater the likelihood that he will buy your product. The Google analytics program is also an excellent tool to see your conversion statistics. To conclude with, a successful website needs a few hundred incoming links, creation of new content and updating of existing content, a fast web hosting server, and a good sales copy.

About the Article

This is a genuine article custom written for WHL (WebHostLead.com). WHL is an unbiased top web host reviews directory based on webmaster reviews about the best web hosts.

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