29 May Auditing and Improving Your Website
This article will give you sufficient knowledge on how to maintain a site’s quality level that avoids visibility and usability problems.
You may ask yourself why site maintenance is relevant to search engine optimization, promotion, and internet marketing – isn’t this the job of the webmaster or site administrator?
Remember that the Integrated Approach considers site quality maintenance as a secondary yet obligatory addition to your promotion campaigns and traffic analysis. The content of the website is the foundation upon which to build the online business. The higher the quality of this material, the more successful the business will be.
It is strongly recommended that you start your SEO campaign with a site quality assessment, especially in the following situations:
- When providing SEO / SEM services and being hired to promote a website already created by somebody else. In this case, you should cooperate (if possible) with the site development and administration team to properly prepare the website for the SEO campaign.
- When you have just developed a website of considerable size but cannot afford the time or resources to double-test every page and function.
- When a website you’re working with uses a dynamic technology and/or is constantly changed and updated with new materials, products, news, etc.
- When the website you’re working with is developed, maintained and managed by a group of people on a regular basis. Even if the team is well coordinated, this usually means that site quality will still yield some gaps.
Site quality assessment means detecting and troubleshooting the two principal factors that ultimately determine site traffic and visitor conversion: site visibility and usability.META and TITLE tags and other elements important for the search engines), it means you’re having visibility problems.
When you’ve removed all errors and breaches that could potentially damage your visibility, pay attention to usability flaws: missing or incorrectly displayed images, broken links (these can frustrate not only spiders but human visitors also), missing JavaScript included or CSS styles. These types of usability problems appear in your site by not displaying or functioning correctly.
Remember your audience is always split into human visitors (the “visible” audience) and search engine spiders (the “invisible” audience). If your site isn’t initially spider-compatible (has broken links, lacks META and TITLE tags and other elements important for the search engines), it means you’re having visibility problems.
Finally, whether you’re a hired hand or running an SEM campaign for your own site, you may want to clean up the technical waste which emerges when a website has been on the Web for a long time or when it lacks proper supervision. This generally means orphaned files which are no longer included or linked to from anywhere and just clutter your hosting space.
For more information on Search Engine Optimization,Internet Marketing or Web Design, please contact BLaST creative today.
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