Taking Proper Maintenance and Care of Your Website
by Danny Brown on January 21st, 2008
No matter how successful your small business may be, there are always ways to make it even more successful. One of the most effective ways to do this is by having an up-to-date and well maintained website. With Google and other search engines preferring new content over SEO-heavy text and old information, making sure you look after your website can mean the difference between a relatively successful business and a very successful business. Think of your website like a garden – with proper maintenance and care, it can grow into something beautiful and, most importantly, fruitful.
Seeding Your Garden with Content
Everybody’s heard the phrase “content is king”, and nowhere is this truer than online. Without content, after all, why would anyone visit your website in the first place? Therefore, make sure you constantly update your website with new and fresh content.
This could be anything from latest company news to special offers – anything that you have a reason to put up on your website, make sure you do actually put it up. Depending on your needs and current situation, you can either do this yourself, or outsource your online presence to a third-party specialist company. Although this can cost more, it can be worth if for a more professional looking website.
Testing Your Soil
Analytic software will help you analyze your website and ensure that it’s running to its maximum potential. For example, it can advise you on what are the best keywords to use to get onto Google’s top pages; it can also advise you if there are any broken links, as well as generally help you to keep your site running to its best. IBP and Arelis are particularly useful pieces of software that can help in this area and provide the results you need.
Getting Rid of the Weeds
The biggest turn-off for many Internet users is a badly designed site. If it’s Flash heavy with lots of graphics cluttering the page, or your link navigation is confusing, you can be sure you’ve just lost a potential customer. Besides, remember that Google prefers content to images? Therefore, there’s no need to make your site one of the flashiest on the Internet just for the sake of it.
Instead, provide a clear layout with simplistic links, and an overview of your company on the front landing page if you like. If visitors can find what they’re looking for quickly, they’re more likely to stay and buy, so keep it simple.
Pruning and Watering
There’s nothing worse than visiting a website and finding it out of date. Imagine if you visited CNN’s website and found the news there from last month – it wouldn’t instill confidence in you that they could be trusted with what you need, and the same goes for your website. Make sure that all your latest offers and product range is highlighted, and when important details change, update them immediately.
These are just some of the basics that you should do to maintain your website. However, they’re also some of the most important, and the ones that will leave a lasting impression on your visitors, so make sure you have them taken care of before they cost you potential sales.
