James Williams from Asporea explains how you can build your own valuable website using WordPress that will continue to attract visitors 365 days a year.
You can have a great WordPress site
Some websites are brilliant at attracting visitors and keeping them coming back each day for new content. For some people having a high-performing website is just a pipe-dream; they treat their WordPress site like a hobby, but it really doesn’t have to be that way. A well-designed website, hosted on reliable servers with good SEO and strong pillar content are the four keys to your success.
Find a professional designer
Whether you’re building a WordPress site for business, for pleasure or for a hobby – you are building it for someone. This person or people are called your audience. Consider your audience when designing your site, because their opinion counts. It matters what they think about your website, because the site is for them. If it doesn’t provide tantalizing and engaging content, on a brilliant functional site then they will not return.
Don’t compromise on quality web hosting
Imagine a first date, you’ve got your best threads on, you’re groomed to perfection and then you turn up in your dodgy old pick-up truck. That’s what it’s like when you’re create site and content are hosting on the wrong platform. Your hosting provider must be able to support WordPress and serve it to visitors quickly. If it doesn’t then you should be talking to us.
A fast reliable WordPress hosting platform is essential for your long-term success. Without it, your visitors won’t think much of you and Google won’t bother to index your site. More and more emphasis is being placed on site speed as a measure of index success in Google. So you can be doing everything else right on your website, but if it doesn’t perform quickly then Google won’t rank it.
Spend some money on an SEO expert
It is true that you don’t need an expert to do SEO for you these days… but it helps. An SEO expert has the skills and updated knowledge to expertly fine-tune your website for maximum hits. Without good SEO, your site is more like a badly laid out supermarket. Good SEO puts up signage in the aisles and starts to organise your content in a way that makes sense to readers and search engines… the result is a site that performs well in search engine rankings and delivers you more customers. Recently we had a customer with an online store. Over time their store which used to do well in Google, had been outranked by its competitors. A good dose of expert SEO and the sales started to return, double and triple what they had been in the past. All because customers could find them in search.
Keep writing thought-provoking content
Writing good topical blog posts is good for your search engine rankings. The keywords and content will keep getting you listed. But there is a different type of content that you need to also plan and write. Called Pillar content, this content is not time sensitive and it attracts the bulk of your visitors of specific key topics.
The reason why pillar content is so effective is that good content is hard to come by. People write articles all the time, but very few spend the time to really create that useful content that reads more like a ‘how to’ lesson than an opinion piece.
Keeping your website fast and fresh is key
The long term nature of pillar content means that it stays fresh forever, and offers real value to anyone who reads it. Behind the scenes it will create back links to your blog which is useful for increasing the google ranking of your website. Over time this will increase your ranking and drive more people to your website over time. Consider doing at least one pillar article every couple of months and over time you’ll find that you’ve generated some great topics that search engines will index and your readers will love you for.
