The Maintenance and Advertising of Websites
(Page 1 of 4 )
Today we look at ways to maintain and advertise a site with Herman Drost. First, we'll study how to keep your website looking professional in seven easy steps. Then, we'll learn how to write effective sales copy for the Web.
Maintenance of your website 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 website 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 website 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.
Next: Three more tips >>
More Web Hosting How-Tos Articles
More By Herman Drost
