Running Scheduled Maintenance on Your Website
I've often talked about the need to have your own website, regardless of your preferred method to make money online. Having a web presence will only help you become more professional, knowledgeable, and proficient. Just as important as having your own website however, is the need to run a maintenance check on it.
A website can be a lot like a car, when looked at from a maintenance point of view. There are things that should be done on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis. Not keeping you website up to par can cause a lot of problems down the road, especially when looked at from and SEO point of view.
Weekly Website Maintenance
If you want to ride your way to number one in Google for your search terms, adding unique and fresh content daily can help a lot. Maintaining your website and updating it at least weekly is a crucial step if you want to have a successful site.
As you are updating your content and adding new pages, make sure that you "clean" each page prior to uploading it. Run through a standard checklist that includes a spell check, a W3C valid code check, proper use of H, Alt and Title tags.
Monthly Website Maintenance
If you have not updated your site map weekly at this point you need to. Ensure your site map is current and submit it to the Search Engines. This is also a good time to look at the navigation and layout of your content. If you have been adding content on a regular basis, you often will need to take a step back and organize your links and navigation better.
Yearly Website Maintenance
At least once a year you should go through each and every page of your website. Use the new knowledge you have gained over the last year to implement new search engine optimization strategies. Update your information and make sure that your contact forms work.
It may take a little extra work running maintenance on your website but, it really is a must. Things in the Internet world change so often and so fast that without a scheduled maintenance plan, your website will quickly lose it's value and appeal.
