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.