If you’re a homeowner, then you know the importance of maintaining your house. As long as you keep your home from deteriorating, you’ll be taking care of that long term investment. There’s always something you need to add, subtract or repair around your house.
A good business website can be the same. You don’t just put up all your information on your website and sit back and relax. Like a home, there’s always one, two or twelve things you may need to do. Maintaining your website is a good practice for any business. Aside from having a better page ranking on search engines, a dynamic website also attracts visitors and keeps them coming back for more.
So once you’ve had your website up and running, what exactly do you have to do?
Here are some tips:
In with the new, but keep the old too.
We all wish we could have new furniture every season or every year but that’s not exactly feasible. The same thing with your website – you don’t have to replace your content, just add to it! In fact, the older your (good) content is, the better, because people return to your site as reference in the future. However, having fresh content will keep them coming back for more! What exactly do you have to write about? It can be almost anything, but make sure it’s relevant and well-written. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think of what they’d like to read or know about.
Get listed and get found!
Do you remember the days when people still said “I’m in the book!” when you asked how to get in touch with them? Back then, you had to actually get listed in the phonebook if you wanted people to find you. The same still applies to your website – get listed in the various directories so your site can be crawled by different search engines and your potential customers can locate you. Next, you’ll have to tweak your website keywords so people searching for you on Google or Yahoo can easily find you. Search Engine Optimization and using the right keywords to get you ranked higher on search engines is one of the best ways to get your site way up on the search engine ranking. Check out our website optimization packages (PDF) if you’re interested in getting higher up in the search engines.
Beg, borrow or steal the right tools for the job.
Okay, so we really don’t advocate stealing ANYTHING! Investing in the right tools can make things a lot simpler when maintaining your website. A good web content management system (or CMS – that’s the interface you see when you’re making any changes to a site) will save you time and money when having to deal with dozens of web pages, articles, pictures, etc. WordPress has one of the easiest interfaces available today (plus it’s open source!) and there are hundreds of useful plug-ins out there.
We implement WordPress on websites all the time, so get in touch if you need some help. We also install all types of WordPress plugins and website add-ons that help you keep your content fresh. Consider adding some of these great ones below:
Share This is an app you can easily install and lets people easily share anything they find interesting on your site with other people.
Search Everything lets people do just that – it’s a much more powerful search tool that lets users search your site.
And if you tweet, then the Wicket Twitter Widget lets you easily display your tweets on your site.
But not everyone can hire a full-time webmaster to do all of this work, so if you’re much to busy to do it on your own, then let us do the grunt work on an on-call basis! We offer a web maintenance package for as low as $525, which includes 8 hours of web maintenance services for the price of 7 and you’ll have the benefit of our professional and experienced staff to help you keep your online home in great shape! Thinking this web site maintenance is what you need? Give us a shout and we’ll make it easy for you.
Tags: Blogs, Online Advertising, Online Marketing, Online Marketing Strategy, Optimization, Promotional Ideas, Self Promotion, SEO, Web Copywriting, Web Performance, web site maintenance, Wordpress Plugins
Great tips! Thanks for sharing. Your web maintenance package looks like a good deal.