Day 18 – I’ve got an iWeb site, visit me

Today’s lesson is all about promoting our iWeb sites and getting visitors doing just that, visiting. There are many methods a web site owner can employ to get people to their web site. It isn’t just a case of getting the SEO right and then sitting back and waiting. Sure that will work, but it will work slowly and you want hits now! So once you have published your site and registered with Google what else can you do to make sure you attract as many visitors as possible to your iWeb site? Read on and find out.

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Social Media

Clever use of social media apps and tools is without doubt one of the biggest ways to bring in visitors to your iWeb site. How can social media help you? It’s simple if you think about it. FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube for example are some of the most visited sites in the world, we all know that. So by setting yourself up pages and or accounts on each (or at least as many as possible) of these sites will help you attract visitors.Creating a FaceBook Fan Page for your site is paramount and so then is adding a FaceBook Like button to your iWeb page. Each time a visitors ‘Likes’ you they share your site with their FaceBook followers who may in turn then visit you.

Twitter works in much the same way and adding a button to your iWeb page that allows users to tweet about your iWeb site, and ultimately share the URL can only bring you in more visitors. The choice of social media sites to use can be overwhelming which is why I have just give examples of Twitter and FaceBook here. Many niches now have their own social media sites and you really should use them if they fit your iWeb site.

I mentioned YouTube earlier and this can help providing you have content that will work in the video medium. It isn’t for everyone but if you think you could add a video or two to YouTube that would help your site’s visitors then do so.

Commenting on other sites

No matter what niche your iWeb falls into there will be a blog about it somewhere on the WWW. There are blogs about absolutely everything (but if yours doesn’t why not start one!!) and where there is a blog there are comments at the end of posts. When you add a comment to the end of a post in All About iWeb you have to enter your URL. If your comment adds something to the post on that blog then there is a good chance people will click on your URL because you sound like someone who knows what they are talking about.

There is a certain etiquette to posting comments on blogs though which you really should adhere to. If you want people to visit your site after reading your comment make sure you add something constructive; a simple ‘wow! great post.’ just really doesn’t cut the mustard and you are more than likely going to get plonked straight into the spam bin. Once you have commented on a blog you would normally have to wait for the blog owner to approve your first comment. Once that is done and you should be able to comment freely on the same blog. But keep it useful. The more useful to other visitors to that blog then the more likely they are to visit you.

Dont just stick to one or two blogs either, find as many as you can in the same niche as your site and do some networking.

Help on Forums

When I first started All About iWeb my visitor numbers were low. Apart from iWeb FAQs there weren’t any decent iWeb tutorial sites about so I had no blogs to comment on. That’s when I hit on the idea of commenting on forums. Apple has a great support section and a forum for almost every single product it produces, iWeb being one of them. So for the first few months I used to spend a few hours every night reading through posts on the iWeb forum on the Apple site and answered questions. Of course my user name was/still is  AllAboutiWeb and I made sure I added my URL to my user profile. After a short time visitors to AAi started to increase. Not only because of my profile but because I would use some of the questions asked in the forum as ideas for tutorials. Someone would ask the solution to an iWeb problem they had and I would reply by saying ‘visit my site, I have a post on that’, and loads of people would.

Make sure your site design ‘rocks’!

We covered iWeb site design in the earlier part of this 21 Day program but what I didn’t stress was how important it was to make sure a modern, useful and gorgeous web site is important if you want people to come back, or more importantly to tell their friends and colleagues about. If you look like a site that was designed in 1998 then no-one will come, well perhaps once after you have featured in a post on a web-design blog called ’20 worst looking web-sites of 2011′; and you don’t want that.

Implementing SEO

I mentioned in the opening paragraph about using SEO but this really is a vital step to insuring you attract more visitors. It stands to reason the higher up you appear in search engines the more people will visit your site. Don’t use the excuse that iWeb is SEO ‘unfriendly’ because that doesn’t work. EVERY web site’s SEO is only as good as the SEO that has been put into it in the first place. WordPress for example is not better at SEO than hand-coded web sites, images still have to named properly as do pages and title tags, content still has to be keyword rich. Almost every WordPress blog will be using an SEO plug-in to help the web master get his title tags right and his search engine description just so, and that is what the iWeb SEO Tool does for iWeb users. You have NO excuse folks, your SEO should be your priority. Here’s a look at the plugin I used for this very page, in this very blog.

Tomorrow I will be showing you how to add the SexyBookMarks (just like you see at the bottom of my posts) to your iWeb site so you can get the best out of social media and get the visitors rolling into your blog, until then!!

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