The primary objective of setting up a website is to promote a business by enabling the target market to access information about it.

The measure of a site’s success is its ranking. Volumes have been written about the need to improve website rankings and how to do it. While there is a great deal of relevant material out there, people often overlook the basics of a high ranking which is the foundation on which everything else that goes into a successful website must be built.

 

What follows are the 5 imperatives that matter in website ranking.

1. Updated Content: Great content is fundamental to ranking success. However, what is often overlooked is what happens after the content has been seen and absorbed? What is there to make the viewer come back again? Having a visitor to your site click on the “Buy” button is great, but he must keep coming back to the site so that yours is the brand associated with a specific need and the one-time buyer becomes a regular customer. This requires the content to be regularly updated and kept relevant to the interests of the target market.

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2. Original Content: Regularly creating original content that appeals to the market is very tough. It is not always possible to have something completely new or original to say. That is why most of us base much of the content we place online on material that we have seen elsewhere. That is fine, but plagiarism is not. The second a visitor to your site has a sense of Déjà vu and feels he has seen the material before, your credibility is damaged. If you copy material, what other unethical practices are going on? The concept may have been presented somewhere else, but with creative writing and presentation, you can make it your own and have visitors coming back to look that the new and interesting material they know will be available to them.

3. Focus On The Brand: Focus the web content on your brand. Present visitors with your goods or services and why your brand is the right one for them. By making your site and, by association, your brand something of interest, the need and desire to buy will be linked to your brand and will be the automatic purchasing option. Create webinars, podcasts, and other channels to interact with people and keep your brand alive in their minds.

4. Go Live: Setting up a regular schedule where you talk to people about the products or services you offer. Do not simply use a selling spiel but instead tell them about how the product/service was conceived, why it is successful, the market feedback, the problems overcome, and the plans of the future. This will create a link between you and your audience that translates into brand loyalty.

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5. Clean Up The Site: Audit your website regularly. It is surprising how much junk collects over time and how that hurts the visitor’s experience. Clean up duplicate meta tags, descriptions, 404 errors, dead links (on-page SEO), and so on. The cleaner and smoother the visitor’s experience is, the more he will want to come back.

Set up and use your site the way you want to but keep these 5 fundamentals in mind. That will keep it pointed in the right direction and make it a platform for business growth.