5 Key Reasons Why You Need Maintain Your Website
Imagine having a storefront that you didn’t maintain. The windows are dirty, the floors need to be swept and the inventory on your store’s shelves are sparse. Now picture your online business as a store in the same manner. Think about why you need to maintain your website. Keeping your shelves nicely stocked with informational goodies, or atleast explaining where the goodies can be found? Here are 5 key reasons why you need to maintain your website. 5 Key Reasons Why You Need to Maintain Your Website Google likes it fresh! Having fresh updated content that is unique to your online business is a priority. As the spiders crawl your pages they are searching for something that they haven’t seen over and over again on the web. Think about your browsing experience, when you are looking for a specific search term or keyphrase the ones with the most niche answer to your search will be the most valuable to you and will most likely earn your clicks. Content is being created every second on the web so you must do your work to keep that fresh perspective and speak clearly about what it is you have to offer over the competition. Write from clear and consistent information. Many websites tend to boast about their services and push their product and pricing without clearly outlining what it is they have to offer. How many times have you found yourself clicking around on a site and become turned off by their lack of clarity so you bail and move on to the next search listing? Maintaining your website with clear messaging as to what it is that your unique company has to offer not only drives sales but it creates loyal customers who will return again and again for your services and or products. Consistency in your updates and messaging is equally important. Make a pact with yourself to create new content once a week at minimum. Rise to the top organically! By staying on top of your website’s maintenance and adding valuable content that relates to the awesome business you are sure to keep that google score rising. Your competition isn’t afraid to share what is going on, news and events etc. so you can’t be either. Your customers want to hear from you, they trust you know what you are selling and they are online searching for further info, give them that info! Check out this little fun fact: Americans alone conducted a staggering 20.3 billion searches in one month. Google accounted for 13.4 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Source 404 errors and other common mishaps. We’ve all been stopped by the dreaded 404 errors one time or another and it’s an unfortunate element of being an online business that we must stay on top of. Errors like this happen when we’ve deleted old content or moved our links and forget to rename something properly or left behind an old article on accident. You can get your site set up in Google Search Console via the Webmaster Toolkit and they will notify you when this happens. It’s best to correct broken links and other 404 errors as quickly as possible. If your website isn’t maintained and a search spider catches one of these suckers, it can effort how your site is displayed in the search results. Maintaining your website is free! If you have a WordPress, Squarespace or similarly built website, then adding your weekly updates is at no charge to you. Think of your site’s content like your Yellow page ad (remember that publication?) you wouldn’t let your Yellow Page ad get old and expired with outdated contact info etc. so don’t let the same happen to your website. Those are just a few of the reasons why you need to maintain your website and your online business, it is key in this fastly evolving digital storefront space. Staying in touch with your client via your website and social media channels is more important than ever. If you have any questions about this topic please feel free to reach out, we’d love to help! Like this article and feel like other can benefit from the topic, please share 🙂
Importance of Proper Keywords
By Sue Jenkins from Web Design All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition The first thing you can do to improve a website’s search engine friendliness (search engine optimization) is to maximize the importance of proper keywords you use in your content. One of the things that search engine robots and spiders do is search for meaningful content within the text on pages that they crawl. This means that the sites you design need to help those bots find that content by including site-specific keywords that identify a company’s products and services, especially on the home page. Keywords can be any words or short phrases (keyphrases) that describe the product, service, or information on the site that needs to be advertised. If your site sells products, tell the world about them using clearly identifiable keywords that visitors might use. This can help visitors around the world using search engines to more readily find a particular website. Keep in mind that the keywords within the text of the site’s pages can be the same as any keywords listed in the keywords meta tag. However, because content keywords and key phrases can be integrated into the text in the body of the page, you have much more latitude for including the most popular keywords within the text that the site’s target audiences are likely to use when doing a search engine search. To evaluate your site’s content and find ways to maximize keywords, look through each page on your site with the following key concepts in mind: Verify that the text on each page — especially the home page — includes descriptive keywords and key phrases. For instance, if the website offers printing services and uses only chlorine-free 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper and vegetable-based inks, Chlorine-Free 100% post-consumer recycled paper and vegetable-based inks would be great key phrases to include in the page’s text. Find ways on every page to hyperlink any keywords or key phrases to other relevant pages on the site. If you see keywords that aren’t yet linked to somewhere else on the site when they should be, add them. For instance, if the copy on a page includes the phrase, “Our services include graphic design, offset and digital printing, mailing and fulfillment,” you can easily turn the words graphic design, offset, digital printing, mailing, and fulfillment into individual hyperlinks that link directly to those five pages on the site. To emphasize certain words or phrases within the page content, mark up headlines and bylines using headings tags such as <h1>and <h2> and mark up other important text with <strong> (bold) and<em> (italic) styles. By using these heading and emphasis tags, you’re alerting search engine robots that the content contained inside those tags is likely to be more relevant to search engine users than other content on the page. If you’re advising clients about improving the content on their pages, tell them not to worry about being too conservative with the amount of content placed on every page. Many site owners think that having too much copy will scare away readers. In fact, some SEO guidelines recommend having a minimum of 200 words on every page so that the spiders and robots have something to read and index. When you have finished reviewing and updating your site, the content should be well marked up with heading, italic, and strong tags for emphasis; the copy should include lots of descriptive keywords and key phrases; and when applicable, those keywords and key phrases should by linked to other relevant pages on the site.
