Maintaining your Website.

Website maintenance is not simply a matter of changing price lists or updating products or even tweaking, it's much more than that and to have a successful website that isn't just of local interest, there are some rituals to be observed.

Perhaps the most infuriating of these rituals is trying to tempt the search engines such as Google, Lycos, Yahoo and Yell (there are many more) to give you a rating - that is near the top of the list where people can find it!  There is much debate on how best to do this and the rules seem to change frequently but there are some basics that will ensure that your website gets on the ladder.

First of all you have to submit your website so that the search engines know it exists.  There are many ways of doing this, some of them involving websites that offer to do it for you in the hope of selling you some software, and then there are the free utilities that let you do it from your computer.  These are fine but often submit to very obscure search engines or  just directories that nobody is likely to use in the UK so sometimes you have to be a bit selective.  After all which search engines do you know about?

Google is perhaps the best known of all the search engines and in my experience it is better to deal directly by setting up a user account then use the webmaster tools to help promote your site.  However it doesn't end there, once started you have to keep working at it and there are other things that you can do, all of which come under the heading of 'maintenance'. such as - submit an accurate Sitemap and update it regularly.

In the code of a webpage near the top is a list of information such as the title of the webpage, what it's about, what kind of code it uses and a list of 'KEYWORDS' that search engines read.  The choice of these words and phrases can make all the difference to your ranking in the search engines and the trick is to anticipate what people will be searching for.  It's no use using a phrase like 'technologically advanced mouse catching device' when most people just search for 'mouse trap'.  Subtle perhaps but in practical terms it can mean the difference between life and death for an online business so they spend fortunes making sure that they get it right - and keep doing it every day of the year.

This is only scratching the surface but it gives some idea of what's involved and illustrates that having a website is certainly not an easy option.  So when considering a website, whatever its purpose, just remember that there is more to it than meets the eye and also remember and it should never be neglected or taken for granted.

If you would like to see what I mean about the 'code', click on View at the top of your browser, then Source, and see what this web page is made of.  If you look carefully near the top you'll see the 'meta' tags where the title and keywords live - and more besides...

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Last Updated 06/08/2008