Website ideas

Here are a range of ideas on how you can improve your website.

Add on a jobs board.

One way to attract visitors to your site is to add on a jobs board. There are a couple of free programs that you can do this with. Jobline is a useful extension to Joomla and Jobberbase is fully functional opensource program.

It is possible that you can charge to add jobs onto the site, but if you are looking to increase traffic offering a free jobs board will act as some stick content. We added a call centre jobs board onto our sister publication Call Centre Helper. It now accounts for over 35% of all of the traffic on the site.

Carry adverts

Carrying advertising could generate a bitof extra cash for your web site. Google Adwords is the best bet for an easy way of carrying advertising, but the revenue flows will praobably be quite low. The best way would be to sell advertising yourself, but this can take a lot more effort.

Add on images

Generally the more images that you can add on the more stickier the site will be. Stock photography can be purchased from companies like Fololia and iStock, but it would be even cheaper if you can take digital photographs yourself.

Add on news items

There are a whole range of news feeds that you can add to your site. The easiest way is to add on an RSS feed, but you can also get hold of press releases and publish these. To get hold of these you can either get a free account with a company like target the PR newswire, or you can just ask the PR or marketing departments of companies that you think could be useful to send them directly to you.

Add on a forum

Many web sites could benefit from a forum or an “ask the expert” column> This could be as simple as asking people to email in questions that you then answer, or you could add on a forum package. For a forum package vBulletin is generally the best commerical package phpBB is one of the best opensource packages.

Add on a social network

Adding a social newtwork onto youir website is quite a difficult job, but you can create your own social network through a site like Ning or you could set up a group on a system like LinkedIn.

User generated content

You could ask your readers of your website if they would like to send in articles that you could publish. Some of these can be really excellent, but some can be really ropey. You need to be quite selective. Many companies will get their PR companies to write articles if there is the opportunity to plu their products or services. The problem that you might find is that some companies just turn this into a blatant advert. You can also source articles from websites like Ezine Articles or Articles Base but the problem is that most of these are already published on a number of websites, so you are unlikely to get them very high up on Google.

Write stuff that lots of people want to read

Rather than just adding on content that you think may have value , target your content against popular keywords. Google’s keyword tool enables you to find out how many people each month target a particular keyword. You can then try targetting your content that you produce against these keywords.

It generally pays to start out on moderately popular keywords where there do not seem to be a lot of relevant content. As your site becomes more popular you can start to tackle the more popular keywords.

Ask your readers for website ideas

Your readers will proably have the best ideas on how to improve your website. You can easily set up a poll, or you could do an online survey to see if they have any website ideas.

Track what your visitors are going.

You can get some free visitor tracking. The best of the free offerings is Google Analytics. Be careful that you do not spend all of your time pouring over your stats, or else you will get into “analysis paralysis.”

Track the bounce rate of your pages

I have a personal suspicion that if you want to get up top the top of Google then you need to get a very low bounce rate. Google do not say a lot about this but it stands to reason that generally a page with a bounce rate of 25% should be better than a page with a bounce rate of 90%. To get even more accurate you can combine bounce rate with time on page. The other advantage of getting your bounce rate down is that it keeps visitors on your site. It is generally thought that a bounce rate of less than 40% is quite good. We have some jobs pages that are down around 15%, but this is quite unusual.

Are there any website ideas that you have? Please leave them in the comments box below.