When I first launched my website I viewed it as a kind of online diary and a screen based advert. As time has passed I have learned the complexity of how the internet and search engines work and it's not just a case of writing down my thoughts and anecdotes and hoping people will find it in the vastness of the world wide web.
Friends sometimes politely enquire how my business works and I see them glaze over when I start to explain about SEO, traffic, keywords, long trail anchor text and the like. I usually abbreviate my explanation to "It's a kind of marketing business."
Just in case you are an aspiring blogger, thinking of creating a website, or just curious about how this stuff works here's a quick guide to why it is so important to spend time (and often, money) adding the bells and whistles to make a website fast and user-friendly.
So a good website will be bristling with SEO- search engine optimisation. This is a way of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to a specific website from search engines. So if you know to type https://www.madmumof7.com/2019/10/40-dean-street-family-owned-italian.html for example into the URL bar to read my review of a lovely Italian restaurant in London that's fine, if unlikely.
You are much more likely to type something like "Italian restaurants in Soho" into a search engine and hopefully through the joys of SEO you will be shown the relevant page on my website as an option.
Obviously everyone wants their website to show up on the very first page of the search engine results. If you have a site selling products or services it is especially important for this to happen and that is where working with experts in SEO for e-commerce websites can prove to be one of the best investments you can make.
From creating a website from scratch for you, to monitoring and updating your platform to make sure it is always optimising the experience of your visitors/customers.
Alongside optimising a website it's important to keep an eye on your stats through a reliable tracking service letting you know your busiest times, most popular pages and where your traffic is coming from among other useful facts.
When I first started working online I spent many long hours tweaking behind the scenes on my own site and every now and then spent literally days on a complete overhaul and modernisation. This is not an effective use of time for busy business owners.
If you are disappointed with the performance of your site or want to hit the ground running, it's definitely worth doing research on how to optimise your site or bring in experts to do it for you.