Did you know that just building a website is not enough if you want to do business on the internet?
When the design process is over, there are additional processes that must be regularly maintained if you expect your web presence to get noticed.
You definitely want to start generating traffic and getting leads for your business as soon as possible. This is when SEO becomes important.
Get Some Basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search Engines Need to Find You
Getting your site listed in the Search Engines, like Google and Bing, will take a long time if you do nothing with your website after it is built. You’ve got to tell the search engines your site is available if you want them to find you faster. This is done with free tools like Bing Webmaster and Google Search Console. You will certainly want to collect data about website visits, so it is important to set up Google Analytics on your site as well.
Install A Site Map
The search engines can crawl your site and check out the various links, but that can take a while for many reasons. Providing the search engines with a precise and accurate site map will help tremendously.
Decide on Your Niche Keywords and Phrases for Organic and Voice Search
Getting the right content that uses the right keywords and phrases is important so that Google and Bing can determine what the primary focus of your page is. You can write content all day long and put it on a page, but if the content isn’t written in a way that is meaningful to what your customers want, then the search engines will not display your pages for the information the customer is seeking. You’ve got to know when and how to use those words and phrases in a way that does not get you ignored. You also should not overuse (spam) the keywords and phrases on the pages or the search engines could penalize your website.
Keep Your Content Unique
Some eCommerce sites copy product descriptions and other information from the original manufacturers. Others even copy articles or marketing content someone has placed on a website because they want to share the same information. Regardless of what type of content your site has, NEVER, NEVER, copy the content from another website. Google will find out and penalize your site. Even doing that thing we did in high school of changing just a few words doesn’t work. Google bots are smart enough to know when you’ve copied content or simply changed a few words. Even if someone has copied your content, you could potentially get in trouble with Google. So, all of your content needs to be unique to your site. So, it is important that you keep tabs on what is going on with your site content.
Keep Your Content Fresh
Make sure you are updating old content and/or adding new content on a regular basis. Stale site content causes you to drop in the search engines. This has happened to many, many websites.
Meta-Titles and Descriptions Are An Absolute Must
Accurate Meta-Titles for your site pages are important for guiding the search engines to figure out the right topic for your page. Rumor has it that Meta Descriptions are written more for the searcher than the search engines. When you visit a site, the Meta-Title usually shows up on the browser tab. You typically won’t see the Meta Description except in the search engine results.
Accurate Local Business Listings
Getting accurate local business listings for your website is important. This involves make sure your Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) are correct with the recognized and reputable listing services. There are some listing services that you don’t want to be a part of because Google frowns upon their practices. So you must be diligent and careful to make sure you’re listings are placed with the right services.
Make Sure You ALT Tag Those Images
Something that many website designers ignore is adding alt tags to the images placed on a page. These tags provide the search engines with information about the image that could be very important in helping get your page to rank.
Conduct a Technical Audit Periodically
Broken links, erroneous code, old site code, and slow page loading speed impact the performance of your site. Problems like this will not only frustrate site visitors, but will also frustrate the search engines. Keeping these technical aspects of your site maintained and clean can give your site a good boost.
Maintaining Site Security
Keeping the site code up to date is extremely important because hackers seem to always find that unexpected “hole” in the site code that gives them the access they need to do malicious things. No site is absolutely safe from potential hacks, but there are some things that can be done to significantly reduce the chances of something malicious happening: Frequent backups, firewalls, etc. can often help. Google will flag your site with notifications in Search Console and in the Search Engine Results if malicious code is found.
Ongoing maintenance and Basic SEO are fundamental to keeping your website healthy. 7 Mile Web Studio offers WordPress Management Plans that can help your site perform well on the Internet. Check out the plans here.