Everybody and their mother seems to have a website these days. There are websites about sports, cooking, stamp collecting, and I could go on and on. The point is that with the millions of websites in existence today, it’s important to take steps to help yours stand out. And although jazzing up your website won’t make it as popular as YouTube, it can cause people to take note of your site where they might normally not give it any consideration.
Here are 4 Tricks to Help Your Website Stand Out in the Audience:
1. Invest in Good Site Design
Having a site that looks amazing visually is probably the number one thing you can do to get people to pay attention to your site and return regularly. When people see a site that looks good, it not only causes them to spend time on it, it gives them an idea of what’s possible in the realm of web design.
It should be noted that investing doesn’t have to mean hiring someone to design your website for you. It can mean you taking it upon yourself to learn some of the mechanics of site design and building your own. And this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to start from scratch. There are plenty of website templates available that you can add to or modify to make your own.
2. Have Amazing Content
It can be argued that really good content is subjective and depends on a person’s likes and tastes. But I think everyone recognizes good content when they see it. Good content involves information, photos, and videos that are relevant to an issue, difficult to find elsewhere, and well done in terms of quality.
Good content might be in the form of an amazing opinion piece that takes a different take on a topic that’s of interest to a lot of people. Or it might be in the form of candid and original photos of a celebrity who’s popular at the moment. One characteristic of great content is that it’s original. If you can come up with interesting material that no one else can come up with, your site will stand out.
3. Add Interesting Site Features
While there are those purists who believe that a site should be simple, do one thing, and do it well, there’s nothing wrong with adding features to your site that make it more interesting. For example, you may want to add an audio player or a weather tracking application. Adding such features gives your visitors a chance to engage with your site. And usually, engagement equals interest.
One danger that you’ll want to avoid is making your site too busy or gimmicky to the point where it’s a distraction to visitors. There are ways to add interesting features to your site without the features being overwhelming. When adding features, ask yourself if they seem organic to the site and whether they flow naturally. If not, you may want to leave them out.
4. Make Your Site SEO-Friendly
What is a web developer if they don’t know SEO basics? It really won’t matter how great your website is if no one knows it exists. Although some creatives feel that structuring their web pages for Google search hampers their creativity, it pays to be realistic and practical when it comes to the web. Most people happen upon new websites as a result of a search query. And when it comes to search engines, Google is the dominant player.
Besides, being more SEO-friendly doesn’t have to kill your creativity. Doing things like targeting specific audience and keywords, structuring web pages for search, and upping page counts can all help to get your website noticed by Google without significantly altering the content.
More and more people are deciding to build their own websites, but it’s not unusual for those websites to get lost in the sea of all the other websites out there. But there are things you can do to make your site stand out, such as investing in good site design, posting great content, adding interesting features, and taking steps to make your site more noticeable to Google. It takes time for a website to gain traction and build an audience, but with hard work, it’s possible.
