If you are a Yukon Quest enthusiast – participant or spectator – you probably want to express you excitement over the annual event and to share ideas with like-minded individuals. You need a blog! Websites are a wonderful way to express your commitment to events and ideas. But if you are a businessman who sells gear to Yukon Quest groupies, a website is essential for marketing and sales. So you will want to have a high-traffic website that appeals to the Yukon Quest audience. Here are some tips to get you started:
- Design: Your website should clearly delineate the topics you want to address, and if you are selling products, you will want to make sure you include features like calls-to-action and a shopping cart. Start with a WordPress website and customize it with a free or purchased commercial theme. Let each page address a single point or product/group, and arrange navigation in a hierarchical silo fashion.
- Content: Your content must be literate, easy to understand, and it must pack a punch. You need to pepper each page with keywords that Google will use to index your site for searching. Make sure your spelling, grammar and usage are flawless. If you need help, contact a freelance writer to help you write or edit your content. Search engines detect many writing mistakes and downgrade sites with problems, so take the time to do it right.
- Backlinks: For your website to be effective, people have to find it when they enter a search phrase. That means you want to be on the first page of search engine results – 85 percent of searchers never get beyond Page One. To increase the chances of showing up on Page One, you need other websites to link to yours. These backlinks must come from reputable websites – websites with a high PageRank. And, the backlinking sites must be related to your content is some plausible manner, or else the search engines will treat the link as spam and punish rather than reward your website. You can check backlinks with an online tool that displays who is linked to you and what the PageRank of each linker is. An SEO specialist can arrange backlinks for you.
If you follow these simple suggestions, you will be well on your way towards having a popular, high-ranking website. If you are selling products related to the Yukon Quest, you will find such a website indispensible to your bottom line.