How To Grow Your Online Presence
There are millions of websites that have no visibility. Due to so many reasons, they lack online presence, making it difficult for them to commercialise the sites.
With the incessant change in Google Algorithm, only but a few publishers understand the next step to take or which path to follow to compete in ever growing digital space not to talk of marketing the products on display at their sites.
Even though, the media industry has been polarised by so many online media outfits, it is not yet saturated because there are thousands of specialised categories of websites that had not been explored.
However to make an online presence, some certain steps must be taken and the implementation must be intentional.
Developing a website, using a quality template and theme is as important as creating original contents, organic enough to attract viewers to the site.
Providing quality content is also as important as ensuring a strong Search Engine Optimisation, SEO.
This is important and a publisher needs to understand that SEO is a process and not a magic or rocket science.
I will put the process into three categories.
(1) Crawling
(2) Indexing
(3) Ranking
CRAWLING: Google has develop a robot whose job is to crawl around all websites to find a unique content for an intending user, which could be a researcher, an academic or a reporter. It tracks down an organic content and crawl over it for proper indexing.
INDEXING: The work of the robot is to crawl and pick “Organic content”, which it indexes for a probable search. After this, a content stays in the Google’s bank for search by anybody around the world. If the site lacks original content or it fails to play it up, the crawler hardly identifies it. Indexing is a process and it is like taking the site and its content to google to see and reveal to a potential viewer.
RANKING: We can only talk about this after we had passed the first two steps. We can get there if we follow due process.
Most online journalists only rewrite stories they have picked from other sites, which is not very bad if they had passed the plagiarism checker but the best is to pick new angles from every story they publish. Some journalists even do copy and paste right away, which rather than building their websites will kill it.
Summarily, it is good to obey all the SEO fundamentals, including use of appropriate phrases and key words when captioning a story.
It is also good to maximise all social media platforms in use for the optimisation of our search engine.
For any story offloaded from other sites, journalists must endeavour to write from new angles or better still, do a follow-up story.
