Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing
Just Search | Search Engine Optimisation & Internet Marketing
Building a successful website, whether it is an online store, affiliate program or even just a simple personal webpage, can be a difficult task to achieve. One method is to form a community for your website.
The reason community-driven websites boast a high level of success is because of content. If the visitors that make up the community are consistently active, this ensures the website itself is continuously updated. This results in more regular crawling from search engines and faster indexing.
There are a number of ways to promote a community-based website, most commonly this is done through blogging platforms, such as WordPress (for servers running PHP) or Host Forest (ASP). These software kits allow regular articles, news or posts to be written and published with ease. They also support feedback through the use of comment systems, allowing visitors to debate amongst themselves about the articles.
Writing significant, interesting and/or controversial articles is the perfect way to bring in new visitors whilst retaining current ones. Keeping the information fresh ensures that people want to keep checking back to see what is new. Controversial articles can help generate traffic as they act as linkbait, encouraging people to react to that particular entry. This needs to be done subtly, as being too controversial can lower your website’s reputation and may even spark negative reviews from other websites.
The use of comment systems is a great way to entice user to user discussions, but they lack user control and are often very basic. Employing a forum or message board can really help users to promote a website. It is important to ensure that these systems are well moderated and also that it is made clear that the views published by the users are not necessarily those of the website itself.
Building a community can make a website start to rank through the help of others, although it all revolves around the central concept of keeping the website content unique and related to its purpose.
Stefan Crowe
Creative Developer
