7 Essential Web Site Maintenance Strategies
© Herman Drost

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 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.