According to Internet Live Stats, as of May 6, 2015, there were approximately 939,090,000 websites online. That’s a lot of noise . . . a lot of competition.
I’ve used the analogy before, about being a spec in the sky, and it’s true. You need to find and use marketing strategies, specifically website optimization strategies, to give your site (and/or your client’s site) a brighter light. You need to create visibility and ranking.
There are certain metrics that search engines look at to determine your ranking (whether they’ll use your blog post as the result of a search query, and on which results page they’ll put it if they do).
These metrics include:
Pageviews per Visitor
Daily Time on Site
Sites Linking In
Bounce Rate
Search Visits
Let’s break these elements down:
Pageviews per visitor refers to a view of a page on your website by a person/visitor. Factors such as reloading a page and moving to different pages count. The more pages a visitor looks at the better.
Daily time on site is the amount of time (in minutes and seconds) a visitor stays on a site during one visit. The ‘pageviews’ plays a factor in this. If your content (blog post or website page) contains links to other pages or posts on your site, then the ‘time on site’ will likely increase as the visitor clicks on those links. This is deep linking.
Another strategy to increase the ‘time on site’ is using video or audio. Even short 30-60 second clips keep the visitor in place.
Sites linking in reflects the number of websites that find your website informative and valuable enough to link to it. In other words, if a site links to you, it’s considered an inbound link for you.
‘Sites linking in’ is an important SEO factor, if the sites linking in are relevant to your niche and are perceived as ‘quality’ by Google.
Search visits are those visits to your site that are a result of online searches, usually for a particular keyword.
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave within a few seconds (3-5 seconds) after visiting just one page on your site (the page they originally land on). High bounce rates are usually an indication that your keywords aren’t really relevant to your content. Or, your site may be difficult to navigate or read, or confusing. You want a low bounce rate.
If you’d like to check these metrics for your own site, you can use Alexa.com. It’s free and will give you an indication of how your site is doing.
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Karen has published 12 writing and marketing eBooks, the most recent, Article Marketing: Increase Website Traffic with Properly Formatted and Search Engine Optimized Content.
In addition to this, Karen’s website, Karen Cioffi Writing and Marketing, was named Writer’s Digest Website of the Week, June 25, 2012.
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2 comments:
Your posts are always very helpful, Karen! Thank you.
Thanks, Margo. I'm so glad they're helpful!
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