When was the last time you looked at your website from the viewpoint of someone seeing it for the first time? Have you browsed the web lately and looked at other websites that promote products or services similar to yours?
If your website was created a year or more ago and no changes or updates have been done since then, you may be missing out on some valuable rank building technologies. The World Wide Web is life in the fast lane taken to the extreme. Revolutionary developments occur almost daily on the Web.
Web architecture and technology seem to be in a constant state of flux. New functionalities that enhance your Web experience are frequently released. While these new functionalities are a benefit to the Web-surfing public, they can become your websites worst enemy.
If you're not constantly checking for new functionalities, your website might be missing out on beneficial upgrades or services. Failing to incorporate these functionalities into your website's architecture may result in your site being ignored by the search engines. Failure to remain search engine friendly can render your website useless for promoting your products or services.
When you decided to post a website on the Web, you probably contracted with a designer to build you the website of your dreams. So your site was created and posted and you sat back with your hand poised over the cash register. You had your marketing people do some traditional promoting and initially you got a decent return for your investment. But lately visitors and sales have dropped off and you don't know why. If you didn't also contract for ongoing maintenance on your website then chances are your website has gotten old and cranky. When you do a search on your product or service, does your site show up on the 12th page of a Google search? If so, your site is most definitely old and cranky.
Here's how an old cranky website can be detrimental to your site's ranking. Your marketing team decides to do a campaign built around deep-linking articles. They write some keyword rich articles and add links with tags that point to an interior page of the site. They have an article submission service publish the articles. Then you start getting complaints about usability problems from people who visit your site from these articles. You go to your web designer to find out what's wrong. The designer tells you that your site was built on a web technology that doesn't support deep linking. On digging a little further you discover that your site was never structured to make use of most of the off-page optimization strategies. No wonder your marketing guys have been pulling their hair out over your site's dismal ranking on the search engines. All the time and effort poured into the latest and greatest link campaigns have been wasted.
A cranky old website can be salvaged. Find a designer who is well acquainted with the capabilities and limitations of a wide range of web technologies. Make sure his upgrade will result in a site that supports all the old and all the new search engine optimization strategies. Go over the final product with him to determine whether or not the interior pages contain relevant, keyword rich content and that each page is deep-linking friendly. Look at each page of the site as though it will be the first page a visitor lands on.
Once you're satisfied that you've gotten the product you want, invest in an on-going maintenance service that will continually evaluate your site and continue to keep your site a dynamic, vibrant place for current and potential customers to visit. The Web is a dynamic, continually evolving community. In order to be an outstanding member of that community your website must also be dynamic and continually evolving.
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