Building a Website

For this post I am going to recommend the use of WordPress when building a website.  It is widely known and supported, has good built-in SEO, a lot of customisation options available for appearance, security and functionality.

You will need the following:

• Domain name, purchased through NameCheap or other registrar.
• Hosting, purchased through NameCheap, FastComet, SiteGround.
• WordPress, free and easy installation often included in hosting.
• A WordPress theme (we use Divi), free or paid.

Once your website is created, you need to add content including text and images, think about your branding.  You can create this content yourself or hire someone to do it for you.  Make sure your content is well-written, grammatically correct and interesting.  Google is a lot more strict about the quality of the content it indexes.

Content Creation

The content on your site is probably the single most important element of your website.  The content on your site must attract the right type of traffic and visitors.  It must grab their attention and keep them interested. Let’s discuss different factors regarding the content on your site.

Content Quality

The quality of the content on your site will have a lot to do with its success. Not only are web users more in tune with the quality of content, Google also uses quality as a ranking factor.  Google checks the overall content on your site to ensure it is relatively free of typos and errors, therefore it is important your content is well written.

Bounce Rate

In addition to this, Google also pays attention to the average length of time a visitor spends on your site and whether or not they visit other pages of your site.  This is known as “bounce rate”.  If you have a high bounce rate, it means people are leaving your site without looking at any other pages. Google takes this to mean your content is not what people are looking for and therefore affect your rankings.

Google wants to see the average user staying on your site for a good length of time as well as visiting other pages.  Make sure your content quality supports this.  Keep in mind that visual content like videos and photo slideshows, along with interactive content such as quizzes and surveys.  These are more likely to go viral bringing in more traffic while engaging users and spending more time on your site.

Media Content

Make sure you include relevant images in your articles too.  Images are vitally important, not only do they make your article more interesting, they also provide a great way to let people share your content on social media and bring you more traffic.

Content Length

The length of your content goes hand-in-hand with its quality, at least in the eyes of Google. While it has been proven that the average visitor these days has a short attention span, Google thinks that very long content is “quality” and short content is not.

It used to be that putting up ten 150 word articles would bring in more traffic than putting up one 1500 word article.  These days however content should be long, the longer the better.  Additionally, Google favours content that is regularly updated.  It is better to add content to an older article than to create a new one.  Generally, articles should be at least 500 words, and up to 3,000.

Content Variety

Another important factor is offering a variety of content, try to include various forms of media such as videos, slideshows, and even downloads.  You don’t have to create videos yourself, you can embed other people’s videos in your pages.  If you can create your own, it will help you get additional traffic from places such as YouTube, Facebook and TikTok.

Having a variety of posts on your site will help you get more traffic and make your site more interesting.  Try to include some different types of content for variety.  Aim for having at least ten posts on your site before you attempt any type of promotion. This will help you rank in Google as well as giving visitors additional content and hopefully lowering your bounce rate.