3 Ways to Make Your Website Popular

3 Ways to Make Your Website Popular

It seems like everyone has a website nowadays, so finding ways to stand out from the crowd is indispensable! To make a popular website, use these helpful suggestions regarding content, design, and search-engine optimization.

Method 1 of 3: Have Great Content

1. Choose a topic you know a great deal about. Even if it means taking a risk, focus on something that you feel passionate about. In fact, the internet is a great place for niche content precisely because your potential audience is global, not local; this increases your odds of connecting with people who want what you have to offer. Only by making the site specific to you and your experience will you be able to offer something that no one else can.

2. Front-load the site. Whether you’re selling merchandise, providing instruction, or blogging for fun, don’t make the mistake of taking your site online before it has a sufficient amount of content. Even if your initial content is stellar, visitors who don’t have any reason to stick around aren’t likely to come back later or recommend your site to their friends.

3. Emphasize quality over quantity. One of the disadvantages of the internet is that it is jam-packed with distractions and encourages superficial reading. If your site is nothing but fluff, people will skim it quickly and move on to something else. On top of that, because the internet feels anonymous, people are quick to pounce on inaccuracies, typos, and bugs – which can sink your site and kill your morale. Be sure to pack your site with content people cannot find anywhere else, even if it means you have less of it.

4. Add to your site routinely. Though you should have a nice chunk of content available when you first go online, don’t use up everything you’ve got at once or your followers will get tired of waiting and move on. Ideally, you should prepare startup content, have a small reserve of additional content that you release on a schedule (ex. every Thursday), and be ready to routinely create new content once you have gotten into the swing of things.

• You should never consider your website “complete”; if you want it to survive, treat it like a "living" document that will change over time.
• Consider creating a web feed (RSS, Atom, etc.) so users can subscribe for updates.

Method 2 of 3: Use a Smart Design

1. Make the site easy on the eyes. Even if your site is text-heavy, it should be visually appealing to keep people from making snap judgments about the quality. If you don’t have much design sense, have an artistic friend give it the once over, ask an older relative whether or not they find the site easy to navigate, or even consider hiring a designer to work on the overall composition.

2. Keep it simple. Streamline every page so that people don’t get disoriented or frustrated. Avoid using elaborate fonts, numerous colors, or unnecessary graphics that slow down the page-load time (or make people think they’re looking at an over-enthusiastic PowerPoint presentation).

3. Keep a consistent theme. Use the same banner at the top (and bottom, if applicable) of every page so that people can navigate your site with ease. Tie all your pages together with a color scheme so that people don’t think they’ve been mysteriously transported somewhere else with every click. Be consistent in your font usage by sticking with no more than three fonts, making section all headers the same size, all subsection headers a different size, etc.

4. Embrace white space. If you’re afraid that leaving white space will drive visitors away, just look at any Google page. White space helps a page look clean and uncluttered, to say nothing of the fact that it makes navigation much easier.

5. Use short paragraphs. Nobody wants to battle a wall of text.

Method 3 of 3: Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

1. Use keywords. Keywords capitalize on internet trends, draw visitors, and make your page likelier to come up in searches. Good places to include keywords include the headings, URLs (multiple words should be separated by dashes, ex. “Make-Your-Website-Popular”), and meta-tags.

• Use tags and keywords accurately. If search engines detect that you are trying to manipulate your site ranking by using tags and keywords where they don’t actually apply, it will negatively affect your performance. (It won’t go over well with your visitors particularly well, either.)

2. Build incoming links. The old-fashioned way to do this is by link-swapping – that is, offering to link to someone else if they’ll link to you. Though this can still be very useful when two sites have a good reason to be linked, another approach is to post articles on other sites that link back to yours. These articles need to be informative, engaging, and high-quality. Above all else, they should not look spammy with links that stick out like sore thumbs.

• If you are a decent writer, you can do these yourself, but otherwise it may be worth your while to hire someone else to do them. Guest blogs, for example, are a good way to do this.

3. Keep your content updated. In addition to making visitors likelier to come back for more, this lets search engines know your page hasn’t been abandoned or rendered irrelevant.

4. Use a great domain name. If your domain name is overcomplicated, hard to spell, or obscure, it won’t attract the readership you deserve. Of course, the best domain names come at a steep price, so you will have to strike a balance between your desired domain-name performance and your budget.