10 General Strategies for Maximizing Your Website Visibility

There are an almost countless number of techniques for maximizing your website's ability to reach customers. Sometimes, though, dedicating tremendous effort to these tactics can cause you to waiver from your all-important search engine optimization strategies. To avoid this common pitfall, I have formulated a list of good practices for increasing website visibility. If you adhere to these guidelines for 90 days, you are sure to see some excellent results. 

1. Consistently update your site. If you are trying to generate more users, you must always provide new and up-to-date content. Without it, users are not very likely to gain any type of value from your site and your traffic will slow down. Providing fresh material also lays the groundwork for more returning users.
 
2. Create a great design and layout. If your site is cumbersome to use or not aesthetically pleasing, your users will probably not stay long. Be sure to provide a stellar layout which puts attention on the content. Avoid loud or complex color schemes. 

3. Purchase your own domain. By having your own .com, .net, or .org domain name, your site exhibits greater credibility and professionalism which will make your users trust you as a legitimate business. Buying a domain name is very affordable, usually costing less than $10 per year. Having a top-level domain name can go a long way in establishing your site's professionalism. 

4. Utilize StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has given me some great results in marketing my websites, particularly for the ones which have highly focused niches like football. By providing engaging content from your site on StumbleUpon, users will review and rate your article and make it much more visible. It is important to acquire “friends” and other relationships on StumbleUpon in order to maximize your popularity and level of attention received. 

5. Write guest posts for other sites. Submit articles to others sites or blogs. Webmasters love to get cost-free, engaging articles for their websites. When you submit an article, include a link to your own site at the end. It is important to be sure that your submission is completely unique and won't get flagged as duplicate content. 

6. Tag pictures with keywords. If you include pictures with your posts, it is essential that you include a descriptive title and informative tags. For my football blog, I get tons of traffic from users who perform Google image searches for football images or desktop wallpaper. 

7. Comments matter! When you leave comments on blogs or forums, users will see that you are active and will be drawn to your site. Remember though, not to comment just for the sake of commenting. That is, never spam anyone. Lots of people will leave pointless comments like, “Hey, cool site, please check my site out.” Comments like these won't last long as they will probably be deleted by the webmaster. These only create a bad reputation for you in the blogosphere. 

8. Utilize MyBlogLog. Create an account with MyBlogLog and opt-in to all the communities you can. Doing this will help you drive some traffic to your site. 

9. Be effective with your time and resources. Never buy into any get rich quick schemes. Just focus on offering excellent articles. If you do that, the users and the revenue will come naturally. 

10. Above all else, keep track of your statistics. Monitor your blog's stats via the Google Analytics platform. This tool can show you which search phrases are most effective in driving traffic to your site, and which of your pages get the most visitors. Keeping a record of these trends can help you tweak your website and make it as user-friendly as possible.