How to make your website successful

September 2005

Internet marketing experts agree that there are several core elements to a successful website that attracts traffic and makes money.

Lots of content adding value for visitors
Internally referenced (pages link well to each other)
Inbound links from reputable sources
Updated little and often
Easy for people and search engines to read and find their way around

Let’s go through them one at a time.

Lots of content

That sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? A successful website is a pretty big website. Look at the most successful websites at the moment, and how many pages they have listed in Google:

Yahoo	48.6 million pages
Amazon.com	45 million pages
Blogspot.com	7.4 million pages
MSN.com	6.4 million pages
Slashdot	5.5 million pages
Ebay	3.4 million pages

Having more pages does several things.

Firstly and mostly importantly it adds value for your visitors – as well as seeing what you sell they can learn about your industry, learn how to use your products, research what they want to buy, talk to other visitors and even experiment with using your products.

But it also builds your credibility and positions you as an authority in this field. Who knows more about books? Your local Uncle Sam’s bookstore or Amazon? Having an article library or offering online tutorials proves that you know what you’re doing the way that no advertising copy can. Don’t worry that you’re “giving away the farm” – the opposite is true. Done properly, you build a trust relationship with your visitors so in the end they daren’t go to anyone else because you’re the only one they know can do the job!

Internally referenced

No matter how big your site it is imperative that it is internally referenced – each page links to each other page in an intuitive and easy to find way. Of course once your site grows to more than about ten pages it ‘s just silly to have every single page. But each page links to the home page for each area of your website, and each of those links to all the pages. For example every page in this site links to the How To Article Library, and that page links to this article. So ultimately you will only be two or at most three clicks from any other part of your website.

Once again there are two reasons to do this – it makes it easier for your human visitors, and search engines, to find their way around.

Human visitors will be aware of everything you have to offer and can pick out what’s most relevant to them.

Once Google finds one of your pages it will index all of them – and as they all link to each other this provides more and more inbound links to your pages, showing Google how popular they are, and that they are part of a big (and therefore, to Google, important) site.

Inbound links from reputable sources

The way that search engines (and people) first find your site is often through a link from somewhere else. So it follows that the more links from other good sites the better. Google will judge your site’s importance by the importance of the sites your links come from, so while you need to get as many inbound links as you can, make sure they are from quality sources.

That means swapping links with other businesses who have the same customer base, and submitting to reputable web directories – directories that people actually use, not link farms.

A cheap and easy way to get quality links into your site is to publish your own articles on other people’s sites.

This is common practice – in return for the use of your content, the host site includes a link to your own site in the author box. It works to your advantage because all of their visitors learn about your site. Some people fear that people will use their articles without the link – in effect stealing their work. There is ample software available now to catch that sort of thing so there’s no need to worry. (Conversely – don’t even consider doing this to someone else. Its unethical, its easily found out and it damages your own reputation. There are enough ways to build your site popularity that are easy and fair without having to resort to the ones that are not.)

It’s easy to submit content to article libraries and article banks. Some are very good with an excellent reputation and some are built only to give you a link but don’t actually have any visitors! Dubious article banks are sometimes associated with spammers. Don’t risk your reputation with visitors and with search engines by using disreputable article banks. A reputable article bank will drive visitors to your site and raise your status with Google as well. For nothing!

It is possible to get links by paying for them or by agreeing reciprocal links with other businesses. Of course another advantage of having lots of valuable content is that people will choose to link to you to enhance their own reputation!

Updated little and often

Current wisdom is that Google prefers sites that are updated little and often rather than complete revamps or swathes of new content coming at once.

It might be because if you are adding computer-generated content it’s easier to do it all at once, where as incremental changes are more likely to be genuine, human-generated content. Or it might be another reason that Google have kept to themselves. Google are very secretive about how their search engine rankings work so they cannot be manipulated.

So regardless, publishing a new article or piece of content every day is a good way to keep the search engines happy.

Easy to read and navigate

Fortunately there are standards in place to make it easy for search engines to read your site, and established conventions to make it easy for people to read your site. It is very simple to follow both of these.

Visitors expect to see navigation (links to other parts of the site) in a bar usually on the left (or occasionally right), sometimes repeated at the top. They expect certain “housekeeping” links to be at the bottom, like your Legal statement or your Privacy policy. They expect consistent use of headings, and for most of the content to be in the middle of the page. Creative people know which rules to keep and which rules to break – they work their creativity within these rules so that people understand how to use the site.

That sounds like a lot to do…

So far we’ve established that you need lots and lots of content, updated little and often, laid out in a certain way. Where are you going to get it all from? That sounds like a fulltime job!

Well – there are a few shortcuts!

If we go back to the list of big websites at the start of this article – none of them have created all of their content themselves. That’s a relief! They get their visitors to create the content!

Yahoo, Blogspot, MSN and Slashdot display information, blogs, comments and other forms of content written by their visitors. Ebay’s entire content is submitted by visitors, rather than Ebay staff themselves. Amazon has a lot of information they published themselves but relies heavily on user reviews, users submitting lists, users recommending one product to buy with another and so forth.

So how can you get lots of quality, valuable content on your site without writing all of it?

There are lots of ways, but the easiest and cheapest are:

Publishing relevant articles. You can write these, you can have an agency write them on your behalf, or you can take articles written by someone else and publish them with permission from an article bank.
It’s recommended you have a collection of articles of your own to distribute elsewhere as these provide inbound links to your site. You can submit your own articles to an article bank. Obviously the more articles and the better quality your articles the more people will use them and read them and the more traffic you’ll receive.
You can use almost infinite articles written by other people but don’t forget that any articles you use from an article bank will be raising the author’s brand as well as your own brand.
Providing a forum where your visitors can discuss your industry, your products, how they use them and so forth. Once they reach critical mass forums are an excellent way to build your brand, position yourself as industry leader, change your content little and often, and encourage repeat visitors.

These methods build content-rich pages that visitors will come back to and spend time on – giving your site more visitors and more credibility.

Leanne Smith is a founder of Sleek Services, a popular web solutions service that builds intelligent websites for intelligent people. For more articles or to see what an intelligent, high-traffic website can do for you visit www.SleekServices.net.