Web Maintenance Guide

Never think that once your website is up and running that it will take care of itself. No matter how advanced technically your site is, it will need to be maintained regularly. This holds true for any website owner.

Neglecting the maintenance on your website can frustrate your customers/clients and will end up sending them to your competitors website for business. If you have broken links, or redirected pages, or even unrelated pages, this will cause frustration beyond words for your customers.

Spend the extra cash to ensure that your website is well maintained, this will save you some financial loss of revenue in the end. You can hire any professional website consultant or website maintenance company to take care of your websites

What Is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance ensures that your visitors have a smooth transaction while visiting your website. User experience is what keeps your visitors coming back.

If your website is being updated, it will become temporarily restricted. This can be very aggravating for your visitors. Many times web developers will post a notice in advance that your site will be temporarily unavailable due to maintenance prior to the time the site is taken down. Just by simply posting the time that your site will be down, is more than anything a courtesy to your customers. Not only will this tell them that your site is being worked on, it will also tell them when they can expect the site back up and running. Cutting out much confusion for the customer thinking your site no longer exists.

A web development company can create a website maintenance plan for your site. They can schedule your site for regular maintenance or on an as needed basis.

Here are a few benefits of Website Maintenance

Website maintenance can be handled by yourself alone, but it is better if you have a professional take care of it if you do not have all the expertise. There are many guarantees by having website maintenance:

1) Will ensure website functionality and operations

2) It also decreases stress by not having to worry about trying to figure it out on your own

3) Corrects broken links, missing images, spelling errors in text. Neglecting this aspect of website maintenance can leave a bad impression with your site visitors

4) Ensures your websites financial transactions and e-commerce function without any kind of technical glitches

New websites as well as existing ones need to have regular maintenance as every website owner should be aware of this. You can have the best of the best, but if it doesn't function properly this will defeat the purpose and waste your valuable time and money.

More and more are seeing the importance of hiring web hosting companies to handle their website maintenance because they provide a variety of hosting services at reasonable rates.

It is never too late to make a great impression on your website by having a great website maintenance plan in place. Professional Website Analyst or Web design companies can explain the in's and out's of maintenance to keep your website worry and hassle free.

Website Maintenance Checklist for 2013

Review your website content

Is the content on your website still in alignment with your company message? It is important to make sure your website speaks loud and clear about your services and products. When visitors reach your site, they should instantly know what solution you offer.

You also want to make sure your contact details are current and remove any outdated information.

Link Checks

If your website has links to other sites (maybe on a resource page), check to make sure they are all working properly.

Keywords

If you are not getting the traffic you'd like, it may be time to review your keywords. Are the key terms you're using in alignment with what your target audience would typically Google for?

Test Your Forms

You should regularly check your all of your contact or quote forms to make sure they are working properly. Pretend you are a customer and complete the forms on your website. This lets you check the form completion process from the customer's view and it lets you test the delivery on your end.

Browser Compatibility

Test your browser compatibility to see if your website is loading properly in all of the major web browsers. Cross Browser Testing is a great site that allows you to test your site compatibility.

Check for 404 Errors

When someone clicks a link to a page that no longer exists, they get a 404 error, or PAGE NOT FOUND alert. This alert throws up red flags and makes people quickly leave your website. It's important to make sure you have created a custom 404 error page to explain to your visitors why a particular is no longer active on your website.

Check Your Load Speed

Your site should be checked regularly to ensure that all of the pages are loading quickly. You only get one shot at making an awesome impression to your prospective buyers. Experts say that your website should load in less than 5 seconds. Loads In and Web Wait are free sources that allow you to check the speed of your website.

Review Terms and Policies

Examine the terms and policies on your website to ensure that they are up to date and reflect your business practices and comply with any new laws. If you are updating your terms and policies, don't forget to send out a notice to your current clients to make them aware of the changes.

Check for Grammatical Errors

Over time, errors can slowly creep into your site as content changes are made. A site free of grammatical errors adds an extra level of professionalism.

Back Your Site Up

Every time there is a change to your website, it should be backed up. The virtual world is very unpredictable and you don't want to be caught unprepared. I recommend going an extra step and saving it on a disk in addition to the copy you have on your computer.

You should schedule a regular download and backup a copy of your website throughout the new year. These backups can be done monthly, quarterly or maybe even semi-annually or annually if you don't update your site very often.

Organizing Pages for Website Optimization

Whether you're a SEO pro or beginner in training, executing some advanced on-site optimization techniques is a fairly straightforward process. The main idea is to be somewhat creative in how you use keywords throughout the content of your website. The trick to being effective is developing a cohesive structure of pages that are both keyword optimized and creatively organized with respect to your keyword targets.

The actual keyword optimization process involves how we use certain phrases in specific areas of the page, like the page title, meta description, headers, strong tags, body copy, etc. In this article, I am taking a step back to acknowledge the actual blueprints of the site, or the organization of optimized pages, that contribute to greater SEO performance.

Organizing Optimized Pages

The way in which you plan and structure the organization of your pages is a key aspect of SEO and on-site optimization. In a general sense, you want to focus the optimization of each page on only one precise keyword target and perhaps a couple variations. However, you can take the page-planning process a bit deeper by strategically creating an optimized architecture of keyword relevant pages.

Creative organization of your optimized pages can have a momentous effect on your SEO efforts. By this I mean structuring the pages of your site so they build upon your site's contextual relevancy (or 'keyword relevancy'.) Here's an example:

Let's say we're optimizing a hair loss site for a new keyword category around 'hair loss treatment.' We will most likely create a new page that is optimized for that particular keyword; however, we can take the optimization one step further by building out a number of supportive pages.

Depending on the nature of our website, we may want to roll out additional pages that focus on hair loss treatments for men, for women, natural treatments, and so on. The idea is to establish optimal keyword relevancy by building out a new tier of pages that target more long-tail keyword variations.

Linking Optimized Pages

In addition to the way in which we organize our pages, we must also consider the manner in which we link our optimized pages. Proper linking of such pages can have a momentous SEO impact and sometimes lead to greater exposure in the search engine results.

The important thing to keep in mind is to ensure that linked pages are relevant to one another. For instance, if we optimize a page for 'hair loss treatments' we may include a link on in the content that points to other deeper pages, such as 'natural treatments for hair loss' and 'hair loss treatments for men." This is all good so long as the link makes sense in the content of the page (often in a paragraph that is somewhat related to the link.)

Want to make your website fully optimized? you can hire karthikeyan here, he will be available for your seo needs,

There are two forms of links in which you will want to consider when linking related optimized webpages on your site. They are:

contextual links: links that are built in the copy of a page, such as in a paragraph of text

crumb trail links: the links that represent the various page levels, often seen above the first header of a page (typically on all pages of the site)

The crumb trail links are pretty straightforward, and will often be integrated site-wide. Implementing crumb trail links is a great SEO move, for it ensures all relevant pages are linked together based on the user path or overall page depth of the site.

Contextual links must be built with users in mind. Before building a link in a paragraph of text, ask yourself if the link would make sense from a usability standpoint. This underscores the importance of contextual relevancy while building internal links. If the paragraph or block of content is about a certain topic, make sure that any links in that content are somewhat relevant to the text.

Takeaway Point

When you look at well-optimized websites, they are often very deep and rich with valuable content on numerous pages. Each page is often decently keyword optimized for a specific search term, and each page is often organized into a certain keyword category.

One of the best analogies for on-site optimization is building a textbook. The title or focus of the story is supported by numerous chapters, and each chapter is supported by numerous sections. The textbooks that are chosen for students are those that are well organized and offer a wealth information. Keep this in mind when organizing and optimizing the pages of your website.

Article Source: