1. Visible your site by search engine
Your site should be visible by search engine, so that user will visit your site frequently. Your site should higher SEO score for better visibility by search engine.
To understand SEO you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components:
Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages.
Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page.
Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler.
Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages.
Results engine – extracts search results from the database.
Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.
2. Your design is terrible
The old ad
age claims that content is king, but that's not necessarily
true. It is at least prince, but there is one element that is probably
more important: design. Think about it this way. If you visited a site
that was poorly designed, would you even bother to read the content?
Chances are you'd just leave and think that the page was spam. If your
site isn't well designed, it doesn't matter what kind of content you
have.
Thankfully, there are many resources for fixing your design problems. Most
particularly, image sizes and fonts are the biggest errors that bloggers
make. Make your text easy to read, and people will read it. It's really
that simple.
3. People can't navigate your site
Navigation falls partly under design, but it is also a category into its
own. A website is not just a single page, but rather a series of pages
that link together - which is why they call it a web. Yet too many
bloggers make the navigation process far too difficult. If people don't
know how to get around your site, how are they going to become regular
readers or customers? When people can't find their ways around, they
tend to leave.
What irks me most about poor site navigation is that it's so easy. The
WordPress engine allows you to add a full and robust navigation menu,
complete with drop-downs, on every single page of your blog. So why not
take advantage? Create navigation bar entries for your most popular
pages. Add drop-downs for categories and tags. Make sure there's a clear
and click-able "home" button. In other words, make sure that you can
get essentially anywhere on the site, no matter your current page.
4. You don't make it easy to pay you
To repeat, selling stuff is probably the most effective way to make
money blogging these days. Your readers are your potential clients. You
can use your blog in large part to inform and entertain them, and in
small part to steer them towards your products. It is a balance that has
worked for many a blogger seeking to make more money than is available
through CPM advertising. Yet even bloggers who get the balance right
sometimes don't execute the sale correctly.
The No. 1 rule for any sales process is to make it as easy for the
customer as possible. Don't make them fill out extra forms. Don't make
them hop around to different sites. The fewer steps between adding an
item to a cart and successfully completing an order, the better.
Offering more ways to pay also helps.
5. You created your site to rank in Google
In the mid-00s there was a gold rush on the internet. Google had risen
to prominence, and by 2003 or 2004 it was driving obscene amounts of
traffic. If you ranked highly for a commercial search term, you were
almost guaranteed sales. That's when
SEO really took off. Of course,
when Google realized all the money people were making within its
ecosystem, it decided it wanted a larger slice of that pie. In recent
years they have made it much more difficult to rank for highly
commercial search terms.
This is a problem for bloggers who create their sites with an eye on
ranking. Those practices have been flagged by Google. Bloggers who used
them in the past have been penalized, and those who continue to use them
will continue to get penalized. While you might not rank as highly as
before, it is highly recommended that you follow Google's guidelines for
high quality sites.
Google shouldn't tell you how to make your site, but you should also
recognize Google for the potential sales it can bring -- if you do it
right.
6. You don't make yourself visible
When people buy something, they want to know the source. Big brands have
a huge advantage here. They're instantly recognized, and so people
trust them more naturally. When you're a blogger trying to sell products
or even services on your site, you have to be forthcoming with people.
So smile for the camera and be prepared to divulge a lot about your
self. The more people get to know you, the more likely they will be to
trust you with their money.
Here are some
quick tips for better visibility:
- When you design your site, leave room for a headshot on the front page.
- Tell a full story on your About page. Not just what you do, but who you are.
- Provide your email address. Contact forms just don't cut it.
- Link to all of your social profiles