Why should you maintain your website?
How often should it be maintained?
What website maintenance tools are available?
Who should maintain your site?
There are a lot of abandoned websites on the Net because the owners failed to maintain them. Many were built with great hope and expectation but soon faded away when they realized how much work was involved. Without having a website maintenance schedule your site will join the pile of discarded ones on the Net.
Why should you maintain your website?
Visitors will return to your site if you continually offer fresh content. The content should cater to the needs of your visitors to maintain their interest. For example if your site’s content is on web design don’t add home construction articles.
Search engines will index sites more frequently if the content is regularly updated. For instance new articles added to DrostDesigns.com get indexed within a few hours. Sometimes a new article will even rank on the first page of the search engines within hours of getting posted on my blog.
Building links to your site helps boosts rankings and traffic. This activity should be one of the major components of your website maintenance schedule. You also should be checking and removing broken links because some sites linked to your site may no longer exist.
Improving conversion rates of your web pages should also be added to your schedule. Test different headlines, web copy and graphics to increase the conversion rate of your web pages. Doing this will help you get more subscribers and/or sales.
How often should your website be maintained?
If you have a blog update it at least three times a week. If you don’t have time or don’t know what to write about update it once a week. The important point is to keep a regular schedule so visitors know when new content will be added.
Static sites don’t often get updated because they contain stand-alone pages containing evergreen content that already ranks well in the search engines. If you want the search engines to visit more often and visitors to keep returning consider adding a blog in a sub directory of your site.
What website maintenance tools are available?
Content management systems such as WordPress enable anyone (even if they don’t know HTML) to easily add, edit or delete content from a login administration panel. For static sites purchase and download a copy of Adobe Contribute. It’s an HTML editor that updates your web pages on the server. For small HTML sites you can use Snippetmaster.
if you are a professional website designer use Dreamweaver. It contains all the bells and whistles to build and maintain multiple websites.
Who should maintain your website?
Company owners don’t often have the time or the knowledge to maintain their company website. They either assign the work to one of their employees or outsource it to a professional web design company. Select a company that’s been in business for many years and read testimonials from customers who have had websites built and maintained by them.
Creating a maintenance schedule ensures your website always contains fresh content, is free of errors, loads fast, has a high conversion rate, maintains high search engine rankings, attracts lots of visitors and generates sales.
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