Maintaining the optimized website
Lizardwebs Raleigh Web Design can provide as much or as little web maintenance as a client desires. We can do SEO optimization and maintain websites in a variety of formats. Using CMS systems – WordPress IS our favorite, straight HTML websites, PHP websites or ASP websites – we can help you in most cases.
How much website maintenance is up to the customer. Some customer prefer to keep us on top of all aspects of their website. Adding new content, examining web statistics, optimizing keywords, modifying content and much more. Others prefer to ping us only when they need something out of the ordinary – maybe a new webpage or whole new website layout.
The goal of website maintenance is two-fold in our opinion.
- Keep new content in front of your visitors. NO ONE wants to see the same content over and over again in most cases. If you want return visitors, then you should keep your web content fresh. This ALSO keeps the search engines interested.
- Improve upon the content that you have to increase your search engine ranking. Unless you rank #1 for every keyword you want, then you will only benefit from examining your web content and improving it as you gather more and more data.
With that in mind, here’s our take on website maintenance!
Keep your content fresh. Sites will get spidered more consistently and regularly when the content gets changed more frequently. I keep track of the logs to see when spiders normally are visiting and try to make my updates coincide.
Get and examine the website logs. If your host includes good log tools, use them. If the site handles it’s own logging, make sure tha there is a way to meaningfully sort and review the website visitor data. The data contained in your logs is the secret to building up your search engine standings. If referer links in are accurately captured, the search terms that were used to find your site will be there. You can’t optimize that which you aren’t aware of. We normally rely on Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for monitoring all aspects of our websites.
Check your site rankings consistently. Either use a tool, write your own or manually check to see where your site ranks for the terms that you have chosen to optimize. I normally check mine around the 15th of the month. Track these rankings from month to month to see if your changes go up or down. Try to figure out what worked and what didn’t. I don’t think there is a magical way of doing this other than just continually plugging away. Sadly, it takes a long time relatively speaking to see exactly how your changes will affect your site rankings.
Build up links with other sites of a similar nature. This one can be touchy. If I want everyone to buy those “custom widgets” from me, I don’t necessarily want to be linking to every other custom widget maker. I may however want to link to people that make accessories that can be used WITH my widgets. Such as widget holders, widget cleaners, widget training manuals, etc. Sadly I think most algorithms prefer linking to other similar companies. While this was and is great for things like research topics, news items, etc. it isn’t the best way of handling a commercial site. Imagine if you walked into a Ford dealer and found directions and information about Toyota, Chevy and Nissan as well. Pretty silly, huh? I personally feel that is why so many of these veritable “link farms” end up doing pretty well as far as traffic while providing almost no information of use.
Backlinks – Get out and promote your site and include your website domain URL. Find relevant news groups, forums and any other places that allow you to add content. Interact as appropriate. If it’s a Widget forum, then post relevant opinion or information to the group. Include your web site URL. When the forum gets spidered, voila! You have a new link to your site in the search engines. This is what people refer to when they speak of “backlinks” – backlinks are good.
Warning: DO NOT get into one of these forums and just start spamming your URL. Not only will you tick off the regular forum people, but may actually turn people away from visiting and purchasing your product. Be a good netizen.
You may also write articles on your topic of knowledge and submit them for publishing on community sites or other web sites. The more times your URL gets into the search engines (read “more backlinks”), the higher the website will rank as time goes along.
There really is NO silver bullet for getting to the top of the heap without effort. Admittedly there are several companies that guarantee rankings for your site. Can it be done? Can it be done ETHICALLY? Let’s take a look at things that you really should NOT do.
Bad Website SEO Optimization methods
Multiple Doorways – This technique involves using several pages that are optimized specifically for search engine submission. These pages usually are nothing more than huge meta tags, lots of tags containing all the search terms, text that makes almost no sense but is loaded with the search terms. Pages like these will usually then either have a javascript redirect or a page refresh that takes you to another page that wouldn’t rank very well or get much traffic on it’s own merits. If you have a site that has index1.html, index2.html, index3.html, etc, this is probably the case. This is NOT to say that you can’t have multiple versions of your page for tracking purposes. If you submit a website to Google and the URL you give is googleindex.html and you are tracking your hits via googleindex.html hits, then you are not abusing the system. Just make sure your page contains relevant information. There are other ways of examining where your hits come from, but this can be acceptable.
Script Cheats/Cloaking – also referred to as “Stealth” or “cloaking” – This technique looks at the incoming User Agent most of the time and prepares specifically created text for that search engine spider. Legitimate script techniques were heavily used when browsers were not supporting much in the way of standards several years ago. They are still used to maintain backwards compliance and to provide workarounds on certain browsers in some cases. However, if I subvert that concept to look for the “googlebot” user agent and then start feeding out a bunch of search engine spam to get my rankings boosted, that is considered a script cheat. Normally you can spot this sham by the content that is shown on the search engine brief when a search is done and then get to the site and the content isn’t even close. I lost my very high ranking once to a site that had done just that. They were selling insurance and had included my company URL in the spider spam. It included a ton of terms that had nothing to do with my company, it’s products, or anything else. They were simply usurping the power of the name and taking legitimate customers from my site by posing as an affiliated partner – which they weren’t.
Being part of or creating you OWN Link Farms – These are still ranked highly by several search engines much to my disgust. These pages are nothing more than a HUGE collection of links that provide no useful information, but have a ton of links with a tiny bit of associated text. When you have 1000 links each with a little bit of text, you STILL have lots of text for a spider to grab hold of. Search engines have gotten better about recognizing this stuff, but still I think they end up ranking abnormally hgh and provide little information. One that truly ticks me off is the Superpages site. I was looking for something the other day. I kept coming up with these huge lists of links from Superpages. Now why do I need a huge page of links? I want to visit a company that SELLS the stuff, not pages of lists. In some cases maybe huge lists is a good thing, but it defeats the purpose of the search engine as far as I’m concerned. Don’t do it. If you have links, and you should, keep them relevant and complementary to your site.
Hidden text – Some clever webmasters discovered that they could include a load of search terms in the body of their html by either making the text the same color as the background or so small as to be unreadable. While the text was unusable by web surfers, it was picked up by the search engines. By doing this these webmasters just didn’t have to worry about making their content look like they even tried. Ever get to what appears to be a long blank area or whole page that seems to have almost nothing on it? Left click and hold your mouse, drag it through the area. Most likely you see all sorts of text then highlighted. Classic search engine spam.
General META spamming – It’s important to know what terms to use in your META tags. It’s important to use only words that are related to your site. Discovering what words are most frequently searched on the web allows devious webmasters to take that information and then load up their META tags with these words – even if they are completely irrelevant to their site. That’s why searching for something innocuous can still occasionally pull up all grades of porn sites. This HAS improved over the years, but still is out there.
Dummy sites – This consists of setting up a base site and then setting up several other sites, usually on free web host sites, that do nothing more than contain a lot of spammy techniques and then redirect the visitor the actual site. The dummy site may or may not contain anything useful. Either way, if you are immediately redirected or receive a “Click here” to move onto the legit content, it’s probably a dummy site.
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
or Danger Will Robinson!
Be aware that using some of the spammy techniques as mentioned can actually get you dropped from a search engine. There are things that the engines look for and at closely. If a search engine decides that a website is spamming or falling out of compliance with their policies, your website very well may get dropped. You will have one heck of a time getting your website back on there. In some cases, you might find it easier to pack it up, correct your content/website, get a new domain name and start over again.
If you discover that your web design company has USED some of these spammy techniques, either demand that they change the site immediately or just flat out get a new designer to clean up the mess. Great ranking for a month or two are usually not the goal of any company. Consistent good rankings are what will bring in the customers in the long run. And the goal of any business site is to generate money. Don’t fall for a quick burst of visitors only to find you’ve been dropped from the search engines the next month.
Read more about what WILL get your website banned from the biggest search engine directly – Google Don’ts Dirty Tricks That Will Get Your Site Banned
By adhering to ethical and standard practices, a site that ranks consistently in most or all search engines is possible.
Website search engines have improved vastly in the last few years. I still have no idea some of the little nuances that search engines actually look for when they spider a website, why some web pages that seem useless rank well, why web pages that seem to have the right content DON’T rank well or even show up at times on the engines or why some sites and pages will rank at the top in one engine and barely even appear on another engine. The search engines will never give away their algorithms for rankings so we’re all in the same boat.
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