Since 2008 at Joomstore we have focused on the building and maintenance of your website and I wanted to take this opportunity to share 30+ years of Digital Marketing expoerience and explain some helpful ideas that you can easily put into practice with your awesome website for maximising exposure and response. 

It seems like there is no end to the plethora of options and services available for getting your website in front of the eyes of people you want to reach and connect with online. Once you have captured the attention of your audience, which gets more challenging every day due to the growing amount of digital noise on the internet - there are a myriad of things that you can do to keep them engaged. 

Below are a few simple ideas that you can take advantage of right now in the new year with the existiing tools in your website to add value to your online presence.

1. Update your website contents 

Not only is Joomla getting easier to use every day with recent updates, it makes updates a breeze for content creators. Updating the contents of your website - especially the home / landing page and high traffic sections - is a great way to keep Google's robots happy and your online presence relevant. Google and Bing can see when the last update was made and if you include regular updates to the site content, it goes a long way toward ticking the box to enable better exposure for your best audience when they are searching online. We like to recommend updating the website content every week or two for best practice. If you have a blog or news area on your website, this is a natural magnet for seeding the search engines with things that are top of mind with your audience.

2. Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Of course if your site has been placed properly in Google or Bing's platform, making regular changes will automatically tell these systems to have their robots crawl the pages and take note of any changes to text, images, and code - which then goes into their deep matrix for results that display when people search. An XML sitemap that has been submitted to Google's network is essential - as well as setting up Microdata to allow the various search engines to index your site's pages, links and articles and rank them accordingly when people are searching. Of course it's important to know what is top of mind within your audience in terms of what they are searching for, so you can use those terms when updating content to create relevance between your site and your audience's searches. As long as your website has been built to accommodate these elements, every regular update to the content will work for you in the search engines.

3. Regular Analysis

Viewing your website's traffic statistics is the best way to keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience is looking for, and these trends change all the time based on what's currently happening in your industry. Google Analytics has become a bit technical over time, and if you are having difficulty navigating that tool, there are a couple of easy to use statistics apps on your web hosting platform that can give you the info you need to make decisions around what types of content, pages, and locations your audience is responding to or from. Once you are armed with that powerful knowledge, you can make informed decisions about the types and topics to update in your site. There is a simple method inside the robots.txt element in a website that tells Google how often to look at your site for changes - so if you are following that schedule for doing updates to the popular pages on the site, it will keep the search engine robots happy and delivering your links in search results.

Other Considerations

Aside from these "bigger picture" recommendations, having a presence in Social Media, maintaining the latest security updates, and ensuring the codebase of your website is fresh by installing the latest versions of everything is also important and highly recommended for keeping your audience feeling safe, engaged and traffic flowing.

And if you are looking for assistance or guidance with any of these things you can always reach out to the Joomstore team, we love helping wherever we can. Thanks for reading and if you have any questions or suggestions for interesting topics in our next newsletter, please just let me know.