You Have a Great Looking Website—Now What?

Maintain and Update your Website to Keep “The New Car Smell.”

You’ve just been handed the keys to your brand new website. It’s shinny and new. Images are beautiful, text is great, and everything has been tweaked to make sure search engines dropped by. What now? How can you keep your website looking “new”?

Just like you keep your car maintained and well cared for to keep it looking “new,” Keep your website looking great by updating and taking care of it.  Here are a few simple ways to extend the life of your website and keep it looking good to website visitors and search engines.

1. Keep your website updated with quality content. 

During the web design process you probably worked very hard to create great content for your website visitors.  You focused on putting yourself in their shoes and making sure the information that they want is there.  You labored over making your content concise and compelling.  Keep it up and remember:

Website visitors scan web pages—make it easy for them--use:

• Headings and subheadings.

• Bulleted and numbered lists.

• Plenty of white space.

• Bold important concepts

• Internal links to similar articles.

• External links to sources of authority.

• Images using names, captions, and descriptions when possible.

Finally:  Provide a call to action, do not leave a dead end for your reader.

Test your article by scanning only headings, lists and bolded items to see if there is meaning.

2. Use only quality images.

You’ve made the effort and investment to getting great images on your website and using them in the correct way.  At this point, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by adding unfocused and unprofessional images on your website.  Do not fall into the trap of thinking that your visitors understand that after all you are just a small business and therefore and can’t be expected to keep up with the higher standards of big business.

Take these steps to ensure great image quality:

• Hire a photographer.

• Enlist the help of a talented person in your organization who takes pictures.

• Do not accept unfocussed, badly composed photos to put on your website.

• Use stock photography strategically in blog articles.

• Use photo editing software to crop and do basic adjustments.

3.   Keep your SEO efforts going to help drive traffic to your website.

Although the majority of search engine optimization is done during the design and building of your website, make sure you continue to make your articles, posts and images search engine friendly. Be sure to continue to:

• Give each page, post or article a page title.

• Include a page description for each page, post or article.

• Use keywords appropriately.

• Be sure to use the anchor text of links to your advantage.

• Use alternate text for your images.

Handy Definitions for this Article:

Page Title:  The topic statement of the page, post or article, visible to search engines and also on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Page Description:  The summary of what the page is able, also viewed in SERPs.

Alternate text is a short description of an image that conveys the same essential information as the image.  This is visible mainly to search engines and people with screen readers, but may be seen if the link to the image is broken.

Anchor Text - Text you use to link to other webpages (target page).

Keywords - Words that searchers plug into search engines to find information.