So you have a snazzy new website with lights and bells and things that flash, and lots of great images that you’ve managed to source yourself and that really fit in with the message that you’ve trying to convey to your readership. So why is nobody visiting it?

Building a web presence is a bit of a science, and designing and publishing it to the web are only the first steps. Once it’s there, you have to direct visitors to it. Sadly it isn’t enough just to sit back and hope people find it. They won’t.

Algorithms and Search Engine Optimization

A term you will hear time and time again within the web community is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. What this essentially means is this – most websites get listed on search engines, unless they are deemed to be spammy or to contain too much duplicate content lifted from other websites. But your problem is that unless your site appears somewhere close to the top of the list very few people are ever going to find it. And if they don’t find it then they won’t know it’s there and so they can’t visit.

By far the largest and most widely-used search engine is obviously Google, so appearing high up on the list there is the Holy Grail for most businesses and web developers. But whereabouts you appear on Google’s list depends upon the precise form of words that is entered into the search bar. This is where it gets complicated. Google has a set of rules called algorithms which are a closely guarded secret, and it uses them to allocate authority to every website in what it deems to be their order of importance. Many website owners invest a lot of time and money engaging SEO specialists like Rex Originals to boost their website’s ranking on Google and other search engines to give it higher prominence.

Link Building and External SEO

The SEO specialist will identify certain keywords which are relevant to your site, and if needs be will insert them into your text. These are words or short phrases which are the most likely to be entered into the search bar by visitors looking for sites similar to yours. The task is then to work to ensure that Google rates you as highly as possible for those particular words, so that ideally your site appears towards the top of the list whenever somebody searches for those words.

But not all SEO work is performed internally on your site. The second, and equally important, part of the operation is to improve your site’s authority with Google by linking into it from a whole host of other sites. Not just any sites, but sites which themselves have a good reputation with the search engines. And not just any links either, but links using those very same keywords identified as viable by the SEO specialist. It’s a convoluted process, which is why it is a service performed for small businesses like yours at a cost by experts. But it works, and if you want people to visit your website it is well worth investing in.