7
Essential Web Site Maintenance Strategies
7 Essential Web Site Maintenance Strategies
Maintenance of your web site is an absolute necessity
if you want to keep it from becoming stagnant and losing visitors.
It can be compared to a garden that is not weeded, it soon disappears
from site as a result of the weeds blotting out the sunlight. Maintaining
your web site means continuously updating it with fresh content,
keeping it free from errors (ie broken links, sloppy code) to maintaining
a high position in the search engines.
Let's look at the 7 essential strategies for
web site maintenance:
1. Check for broken links - broken links
will annoy visitors making them click elsewhere off your site, thus
losing a potential customer. Businesses that once linked to your
site, may have closed down, thus causing broken links to appear.
Check for broken links on your site at least once a month. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
2. Write correct and clean html code -
html errors can negatively affect your search engine rankings. For
example, if your webmaster places the meta tags or header (H1) tags
in the improper order on your page your rankings will suffer.
Here's an example:
<p this is your highly targeted keyword phrase your web master
wrote...
Notice that the P tag above is missing a closing
bracket. The code should really be written like this:
<p> this is your highly targeted keyword phrase your web master
wrote..
The search engines will read the keyword-rich
text as attribute of the paragraph tag and ignore it. Since search
engines spider text that is highly visible at the top of your web
page, you will have lost the opportunity to gain high search engine
rankings.
Run all your pages through
http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html to clean up any html errors.
3. Add fresh content - search engines
will more regularly spider your site if the content on your web
pages is continually updated or changed. One excellent method is
to add a new article to your site every week or two.
4. Obtain incoming links - search engines
use linking to create a web of linked sites. The more sites that
link to yours help determine the popularity of your site. Sites
with only a few links don't usually do well in the search engines.
Preferably obtain links from related sites which already rank well
or receive a large number of visitors. Finding links should be one
of your ongoing strategies to maintain and increase your rankings.
5. Monitor web site rankings - the number
and type of keywords used to search for information on your site
can change dramatically. Without constantly monitoring your web
site rankings, you may wonder why your sales have dropped. One must
stay up to date with search engine changes. Adjust your site accordingly
then resubmit it to the search engines if needed.
Use Marketleap.com (http://www.marketleap.com)
to find your site's ranking.
6. Analyze web copy - you may be getting
a lot of hits/visitors to your site but no one is buying. Your web
copy could be at fault. Try rewriting it by placing yourself in
your customer's shoes. Focus primarily on the benefits of your product.
Sometimes changing one or two lines can increase the percentage
of sales from your site.
7. Track web site statistics - from the
site statistics provided by your web host, you can monitor the amount
of visits to each page, where they came from and what keywords they
used to find your web site. You may then need to optimize other
pages targeting alternative keywords to increase the number of visitors
arriving at your site.
Conclusion:
Create a web site maintenance plan that will ensure your web site
is performing at its optimum level. This is essential if you wish
to maintain or increase sales and stay ahead of your competition.
About the Author Herman
Drost is the author of the popular ebook: "101 Highly Effective
Strategies to Promote Your Web Site"
http://www.isitebuild.com/web-site-promotion
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