A very small percent of people who build websites don’t want them to turn into high quality websites. These are spammers, people building personal websites, people selling websites, etc. Here are some tips for webmasters who want to build large websites.
1. Offer Something Unique – If you make “Just another … community” you won’t get many visitors because anyone who wants to talk about that something in already developed sites. Offering unique software or hardware or something unique which isn’t offered anywhere else is the best way to drive visitors to your site. For example, offering a very nice Buy, Sell, and Trade section will drive users to your site.
2. Have an RSS Feed – Having an RSS feed will drive users to your site every time you make a new article. The only thing you should avoid is advertising in an RSS feed. Having unique images in your feed can increase clickthrough.
3. Check for Duplicate Content - Randomly search parts of your website and popular sections to make sure someone else isn’t copying them. If you find someone copying your content the easiest way to get your content off their site is contacting the webmaster. If they refuse or if your content is being copied by a robot you will need to file a complaint. Sometimes it can be very difficult, but if other sites copy your content your site may be penalized. A while ago a user on a spanish forum had copied an article from TechGeeks-Online and used it in a forum thread. They weren’t an active member and I knew I couldn’t contact them through PM. I posted in the forum’s administration section and all I got was lots of rude replies in Spanish. I was polite and persistent and soon enough the content was removed.
4. Create a Forum – This is especially important if you offer lots of unique content. Create a forum where people can discuss and ask questions about your site’s topic. Creating a forum will give your site lots of content very easily. When setting up your forum, don’t use the default theme. A custom designed theme will be the best if you want users to come back to the site. This goes along with having something unique.
5. Ask your users to link to your site. This is the easiest and fastest way to get backlinks. If someone is satisfied with the site they will link to it to help it. Having a ‘logo button’ or banner they can use helps out even more.
6. Be Strict With Trolls – Even if your website is new you shouldn’t live with a rude member in your forums. Be strict and enforce your rules. Having quality content is more important than having lots of content.
7. Do some SEO – Do some search engine optimization on your site. Traffic from search engines is free and comes from people looking for something. Use descriptive and clean title tags and descriptions. Use a robots.txt and meta tags to tell robots where to crawl and where not to. Check your site using the WC3 Validator and clean up any errors in your code to let spiders crawl your site well and avoid errors in different web browsers.
8. Keep Your Site Fast – Use Google Webmaster Tools to check your site’s load time and make sure your site loads quickly for everyone. Cut down on CSS size and use thumbnails instead of images on huge pages. You can use some AJAX to have your site load in stages. Use interlacing on GIFs to give the illusion that images are loading quickly. You can’t have a successful site if it loads slowly.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Slow and steady wins the race in my terms of making a long term successful website with a good community or traffic.
I believe being strict and being consistent with either forum posting or blog posting is very key because people are creatures of habit. I think its very effective to make like a blog post every 2 days so people can always come back and read it rather than posting your butt off in 1 day and not even making a comment or another post within a week.
Keeping your website fast is very important. Its easy to let it get clogged with too much javascript etc. Its always wise to check the speed of your website. A good website design will offer the website user an easy to use experience with fast loading pages. Always keep speed of a website in mind when working with a web designer.