Getting Your WordPress Site Noticed

Designing and creating your WordPress website is an exciting time. With WordPress it’s easy to quickly design an aesthetically pleasing website, and there are plenty of features to play around with. If you’ve already dreamt up visions of what your website will look like, making it a reality is a synch.

However, while WordPress is great for making websites, it won’t market them for you. You’ll have to put in a decent amount of work if you want your site to gain some attention; otherwise all your hard work will be for naught. With that in mind, here are a few tips you can use to get your WordPress site noticed and show everyone the hard work you put in on the site.

Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

One of the first things you should do is optimize your WordPress site for search engines. Search engines are the primary way people find new websites, so it’s important that you show up in as many search results as you can. To do this, your site needs to meet the criteria that search engines are looking for. There are a few ways you can accomplish this.

To start, focus on the speed of your WordPress site. Sites that take too long to load are bumped down in the rankings, largely because this affects the user experience. You can boost your website’s speed by ensuring you’re working with good WordPress hosting plans and only using plugins that are absolutely necessary.

Next, you’ll want to learn about keyword research. Keywords are the short terms or phrases that best describe your site. For instance, if you’re a plumbing company in NYC, some of your keywords might be “Plumber in NYC” or “Plumbing repair in New York City”. Once you’ve chosen your keywords, you’ll want to get them into strategic locations around your site, such as title tags and on your images.

Speaking of images, these are important for search engines as well. Make sure the alt tag has the keywords, and also make sure that their file size isn’t too large. It’s also a good idea to set a featured image for your post, as search engines like to see this.

Finally, create a sitemap for your site. A sitemap is essentially a map of which pages connect to which other pages. Search engines use these to determine the structure of your website and to learn which pages are the most important. There are plenty of plugins available that can create sitemaps for you, making this process an easy one.

Start Using Social Media

After search engines, the other major way that people discover new sites is through social media. If you’re not yet active on social media sites, now is the time. Consider creating accounts for your new site, and then use different social media platforms to promote what you’re putting out there. Find other people within your niche and start forming connections with them. For instance, if you’re blogging about baking a cake, find other people who are doing something similar. Not only will you learn a lot from them, but you’ll be able to promote your website to a wider audience.

Start Guest Blogging

A great way you can promote your new WordPress site is through guest blogging. Guest blogging is when you write content for another website and include a link back to your own. Going back to the cake baking example, let’s say you connect with someone who writes a blog about cupcakes. You could offer to write a post on their site, then mention your own site at the end of it. Anyone who reads the cupcake site would now learn about your site and might visit it. Guest blogging is a great way to take advantage of someone else’s audience and start gaining some attention for yourself.

Advertise Your Site

Finally, your last option is to do some traditional advertising. If you have the budget for it, you could run ads promoting your site on search engines or through social media. Online ads are great because you can specifically target the exact niche you’re after. Not only that, but you get to decide how much you want to spend. If you only want to spend $10/month, you can absolutely do that. Take some time to learn about advertising online, then decide if it’s right for you.

Don’t Let Your WordPress Site Go Unnoticed

After spending so much time on your site, you deserve to have other people see it. Hopefully the above strategies will help you get started, and before long you’ll start to see those traffic numbers steadily climbing. Good luck!