Whether you’re setting up a website for your company or you’re starting an online store or blog, you will want your site to be of good quality, easy to find and capture people’s’ attention. This is important not only to get attention online, but also to give existing customers a good sense of the quality of your brand. With that in mind, here are a few tips on creating your site, creating content and generating traffic for your website.

Setting Up Your Site

A key feature of your site is its domain name. To make your site easy to find, give it a simple web address. Your company name or initials for a business website will work; for a blog – something relevant to the content you typically post. You’ll need to register a domain name or purchase one from the existing owner  if the web address is already taken. If you set up your site through WordPress, you register your own domain as opposed to keeping the .wordpress.com URL, which is widely seen as unprofessional.

Creating Good Content

There’s no clear dividing line between good and bad content, but common sense will guide you fairly well. But what does give some websites an edge over others is how often they post content and how relevant this content is to their target audience. Without bombarding your readers or subscribers with content, post fairly regularly to keep people coming back for more. You should also make sure the content you post is relevant to your target audience. As a company, create a newsletter and post about promos and sales to keep your customers engaged.

For image content, you will want good quality images that will load quickly. For high-end sites that need top quality or specific images, hiring a professional photographer may be the way to go. But if your image needs are fairly generic, you can get free stock images from sites like Burst by Shopify. Using your own photographs will work for non-corporate blogs, as long as you have a decent camera.

Generating Traffic

Some basic ways to improve your site traffic include sharing new posts on social media. Given how much time most people spend on social media, this is effective for almost any website. Give customers and regular visitors to your site the option to subscribe via email, so they’re aware of any new content. A full-on marketing campaign to boost your web traffic will include Search Engine Optimization, PPC advertising, and half a dozen others marketing strategies. Consider a landing page that encourages visitors to subscribe the moment they reach your site – it could greatly increase the number of users who do opt in.

For your audience to find your site quickly and easily, your website’s name needs to be concise and easy to remember, as well as easy to spell. You can adapt: if muscleman.com isn’t available, use muscleman.org. When you create or source your content, make sure you don’t run into any copyright issues. If you are not able to get the right permissions for an image, don’t use it. Make sure any advertising or content people might click through to your site from is relevant to your own content. To encourage users to return to your site, offer a subscribe option.