What you need to know about Website Maintenance

Finally, you have a website of your own but it doesn’t stop there. Although you have your own website, it doesn’t mean it will work smoothly and according to plan. Like machines, cars, appliances, etc. it needs some maintenance. Failure to do it will lead into unproductive results and problematic issues. Problems like security threats, broken links, missing images, unresponsive pages, unanswered feedbacks, misspelt text, missing page titles, etc. can be addressed through proper website maintenance on a monthly basis or scheduled dates.

Before, websites are built using html and will need simple updates from time to time. But because of the advancements, there are different languages are used in websites and skills should be updated in order to get in line with the competitive virtual world out there.

The fast rising of SEO or search engine optimization, getting your website maintained in order to get traffic inside your website is important. A well-maintained website that has up-to-date content and updates will help your website unleash its full potential. Having the latest programs running in the backend will not only keep your website secured but will allow users to keep up with the changes that could lead into a better user experience which is important for search engines.

Talking about having a fresh website, it is best practice to have a regular maintenance aside from scheduled ones. Regular maintenance allows the maintenance team to find certain issues earlier and address them immediately rather than not doing maintenance regularly taking more time and work to address many issues all at once should the time comes for doing maintenance which could put off the website for quite some time and in effect, losing user interests. Certain advantages come with doing regular maintenance to websites. These includes continually improving search engine ranking,  increasing the number of visitors, meeting user satisfaction, and keeping the business’ presence in the Internet strong.

Therefore, having website maintenance plan, together with website management is important if you want to achieve a contemporary, up-to-date, and fresh website; increase traffic and improve sales rate.

E-mail Marketing

For years, the most effective way and has been the best method in b2b lead generation is outbound prospecting. A lot of businesses have used both cold e-mail marketing and cold calling to get the best results. But comparing these two, e-mail marketing produces a lot more ROI due to the fact that it is low cost for delivery.  According to studies, e-mail has better chances to generate ROI than direct main. Today, we’re going to give you some tips on how you should do cold e-mails effectively.

Drip Marketing

When it comes to drip marketing, the contents of the e-mail is not in a “sales pitch” of their product and services but more of a resource for the recipients who can ultimately lead into getting the receiver to have interest on their products and services. Examples of these are newsletters that are currently informative to a certain user and would directly link to the service or product the company offers.

Most businesses send out their newsletters around 2-4 times in a month to their email lists and these newsletters typically include quality content and more of a source of information of their industry.

Cold Blast

A lot of the businesses send out email blasts in their email list for a certain target market. As a rule, you’ll generate more success if you email your list three to four times within the duration of 5-7 weeks. The thing with cold blasts is that these suggest keeping the email short and personal.

You know for a fact that no one has any time to read a long email these days and you have about 5 seconds of their time to get in this one call-to-action. A personalized email would make the recipient felt as if it was targeted for them and they are more likely to think that it is something that can greatly benefit them.

Another strategy that is not a drip strategy is through referrals – that’s without the “salesy” pitch and can lead to a huge increase in conversions.

Internet Marketing Strategy Part 2

Internet Marketing Strategy Part 2

Our next article will be focusing on Content marketing. Now, the first step in content marketing is knowing what type of content to be posted. From our point of view, content marketing is one of the best ways to promote your company without spending a lot of money.

Compelling and shareable content can easily go viral and create traffic towards your website. Creative content takes different forms. Here is a list of the kinds of content you can use for your SEO campaign. Here are the list of content you should have on your website or social media platforms.

1.       Blog Post

This is the easiest way to promote your website through SEO content. With an engaging blog post, you’ll be able to attract potential clients and subscribe to your website. These people will find you when they search for information mentioned or contained in your text. Posting information about your products and their use, tips and tricks and things to avoid can bring potential customers to your site, and also give them confidence in your company.

2.       Infographics

Infographics are images that contain data about a certain subject related to your company or products. These infographics can easily rack up website views and links towards your website. Infographics are also great content to be posted on social media sites for views and shares that will strengthen your social media authority.

3.       Vlogs or Video Blogs

Videos can be easier to rank than your typical text blog or page. Depending on your type of business and keywords used, videos can be a very effective way to reach your potential customers. In making videos, try to illustrate your services or products (How to’s, facts, etc.). Many people prefer to obtain information by being told about something, rather than reading the information. Using videos means these people are more likely to go to your website than your competitor, who doesn’t use videos.

4.       How to’s or Guides

This blog can be done both in text and video format depending on how you wish illustrate the guide. Make sure to make the guide easy to understand and cover things which you get a lot of questions about. Not only does that mean that you will get more traffic to those guides, but it can have the added bonus that you do not have to answer the same question over and over every day.

5.       Lists

It’s a kind of article that gives a list on a specific topic (e.g. 10 ways to effectively monitor your Website, 5 Benefits of Regular Machinery Maintenance).

Internet Marketing Strategy Part 1

Targeted for Success

The path for a successful marketing strategy needs to be planned and today, we’re going to do a blog series about internet marketing strategy.

For today, we’re going to discuss about e-commerce websites and how can you make it successful. E-commerce allows users to avail directly the products and services you offer online. Thus, having an e-commerce website should be an investment in your part.

Today, most online retailers are rushing to deliver goods faster than ever as well as applying technical innovations to focus on allowing the customers to get their products immediately.  This has become the norm these days. Not that it is bad, but this is what the customer desires to get or receive their purchases immediately.

Does this matter to your business?

It would be a big “Yes”. Tapping into your customer’s deep desires for instant gratification can play an important role in establishing a sound reputation online and to get loyal customers in the future.

You think this can be a daunting task? Not really! You’d be surprised how easy it is when you understand the psyche of a customer’s brain. This is something that most business overlook.

Here is How You Can Achieve That?

You as a business owner need to work with your web agency to make sure that your website engages visitor’s brains in a certain way as soon as they arrive to your site.

Gratify or please the brain is equals to Instant gratification is important to a happy shopping. CTA phrases or words such as “Free Shipping, “Buy one Take Two”, “Free”, “One-Day-Shipping”, “Or Take Your Money Back”, etc. can trigger a response from the buyer or even a visitor inside your website. Make sure to follow-up with the promise you make

Being able to feel as a customer, an instant gratification can satisfy the problem-solving urgency for your customers. So trigger words should allow your customers to feel good when buying a product or service from you as long as you follow-up after that.

See you on the next Blog Series. 

Web Maintenance Strategies Part 3

Today, we’re going to discuss the next strategy when it comes to website maintenance which is monitoring your website rankings. Rankings are important to measure the success of your website when it comes to SEO. It determines if your tactics in marketing is a success or a failure.

Over the few years, major search engines like Google has stirred this up with it constant updates in the result pages and introduce a more personalized and localize results. Google has also prioritized the usability and the usefulness of the content present inside the website.

So, the main question is, why do you need to monitor your website rankings anyway? Well, here are some reasons why you have to:

1.       Gives you a good insight where your site currently stands in relation to your competition.

For you to get ahead in the competition, you need to analyze your SEO campaign and your competitor’s strategy. Compare what your competitors do and ask yourself if it is effective and can be applied to your strategy as well.

2.       Keywords help locate your SEO problems.

If there is sudden change in rankings, this can indicate that there might be some problems with your SEO strategies. Remember that traffic fluctuates depending on the current search trends and also by season, so a small dip in the number of visitors can get unnoticed.

However, if there is an unexpected drop in the rankings for specific keywords you are ranking your website for, and then that’s when we have a problem. We all know that Google rolls out new updates or the site may have been penalised or maybe because your site had some technical issues.

3.       Aid in tracking the results of your experiments.

In SEO, there are no ultimate solutions and most of the time, you have to experiment your strategies if they work or not especially during the major search engine updates. However, these experimental strategies have just one thing in common, and that is to measure their effect in the changes with the keyword rankings.

4.       Helps in finding more keyword opportunities

Monitoring your ranking can help you discover new keyword opportunities or help identify ways to increase your website’s visibility.

Not knowing how your site performs will just indicate that you will have no way of knowing whether your site is successful or not.

Clean Source Codes

In our previous blog series about web maintenance strategy, we’ve discussed broken links on your website and how does it affect your total score. We’ve said that broken links can affect your rankings on major search engines and removing these links should be part of our maintenance. Today, we’re going to talk about source codes.

So, aside from checking your website from any broken links, the second is writing correct and clean source codes. Source code errors can greatly affect in a negative way towards your website rankings. For example, header tags in an improperly coded, can greatly affect your web page’s search rankings.

As a marketer, we can’t control Google or other major search engines but we can control the properties of our website that makes search engines put us on top. For others that are not familiar with source codes, it’s what web browsers read to figure out how to display the contents on a web page. For search engines, your source code is what they read to figure out what your website is all about.

And for SEO, the most important part of your source codes is the following:

·         Title Tags

·         Meta Description

·         H1 Heading Tags

·         Internal Links and Anchor Text

·         No Follow links

·         Image Alt Text

·         Canonical Tags

Search engines also read keyword-rich texts as an attribute of the paragraph tag and when there is a tag that is misplaced or not in order, it will be ignored, thus missing the opportunity to gain some points in the search engine rankings.

To be sure that your website has the codes in place, you can visit http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html to help you clean up any html errors.

Stay tuned for our third website maintenance tip. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to send us any comments. And if you don’t have time to maintain your website, we are always available to help you with all your website maintenance needs. Contact us at WebRight today. 

Web Maintenance Strategies Part 1

Having your own website is an advantage for your business and to keep it running smoothly, you need to maintain it once in a while. A dormant website is useless and won’t attract visitors than can turn into potential customers in the future. To prevent this from happening, updates should always be your first priority.

Updates like fresh content, broken link removal, coding check, alignment of text, meta-descriptions, etc. are needed to keep your website on high ranking search positions when it comes to major search engine. In web maintenance, there are 7 objectives that you should focus and today, we’re going to discuss them one-by-one.

Broken Link Check

There are bad consequences if your website is full of broken links. Wouldn’t it be annoying if you click on the intended page and you wouldn’t find what you’re looking for because the link or page is broken?  Yes, having broken links inside your website is a way to lose potential clients or customers. Also, you might have links from other websites that might have been permanently closed down. 

These links are considered broken and it is advisable that you take it down as soon as possible. 

Another consequence is your search engine rankings. Search engines conduct checks on website with the use of crawlers. These crawlers will determine the quality of your website in terms of keywords, links and content. If these crawlers encounter broken links on your website, it may affect and lower your search engine rankings.

The best way to prevent this from happening is maintain your website. Try using free website audit programs or website to determine broken links and fix them. Also, you can avail website maintenance services from web development companies.

Our next tip will be discussed in our next post. Would you like to take a guess as to what are the rest of the factors that you need to focus on in website maintenance? Stay tuned.