Your website management company should help you with many things. Here are 5 things which we feel are critical.
Keeping Your Website Backed Up And Safe: In today’s world security is so important. It is naïve not to think anyone will ever attack or hack your website. So it is imperative that your management company is backing up as often as possible so that if something malicious happens, you can get your site back. It is also important to know where your site is being hosted, as some do a much better job than others with security. At RooSites we use industry best website hosting.
SEO: One of the most important things for companies is to be found on search engines like Google. To do so, you need to make sure that your management company is working on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it is referred to. We realized early on, that it was not enough just to build nice websites, they have to rank well. If you aren’t seen, then no matter how good your company is, or how pretty your site looks won’t matter. There are four types of SEO we help our clients with. The first is on page SEO. There are several factors involved to optimize your site including use of headline tags, meta tags, and other on page ranking factors. We also assist with Technical SEO, where we assist Google’s bots in successfully crawling, interpreting, and indexing your website’s pages . This also includes the creation and submission of sitemaps. Next we have what’s called local SEO. This is when you go to do a search for something near you, say a plumber or other services. So if you are in Dunedin Florida, you would search for Dunedin Plumber, not just “Plumber”. This is what usually shows up at the top or the right of your search results page. In many cases thousands of people see this listing every month, so it is so important to have a local SEO presence. We also assist with Off Page SEO, which are tasks we do outside of your website to help it rank higher in Google’s search results. This includes getting good social media advertising, getting clients to give you good reviews online, and getting links from credible websites.
Content: This goes with number two, the most important factor in search engine rankings is your content[↗]. I always use this example: Say you are very good at what you do and have a nice little seven page website. I come along and build a similar website but every week I post an article about the subject matter our website is all about. After one year I have over 70 or more links within the google index (including tags and other links which google indexes), or 10 times as many as my competitor. So I ask you, who should fare better in search? Common sense, right? All of our management plans include time to help with content and blogging as well as help with social media.
Pay Per Click Advertising: One thing your website management company should be doing is helping you with is your Google ads, Facebook ads and all Pay Per Click Ads. SEO by itself is not always enough, so if you can start an advertising campaign, you can fill in the gaps where you aren’t being found as highly as you would prefer.
Page Speed Optimization: One thing search engines put a lot of stock in is how fast a page loads. Since we use different content management systems, such as WordPress optimizing your site is very important. Your website management company should be able to help you by installing a caching plug-in and other methods. A lot of times companies have too many plug-ins and things going on which slows down the site. The one thing I have noticed over the years some of the testing tools are not as accurate as they need to be. For instance some of the tools are measuring how long things take to load in the background. Now this doesn’t really affect your viewers, as everything that they need to see, loads fast, and if there’s some JavaScript file loading in the background it really doesn’t affect them.
Bottom Line: So these are five things your website management company should be helping you with, there are obviously more things as every client is different. What we do at RooSites is design different plans for different companies so they have enough hours to do all the things they want to achieve. And, by signing up for our plans they save roughly 50% on their development hours which is nothing to sneeze at!
If you need help managing your website or designing a new one, don’t hesitate to contact us, we are happy to help!
As a web guy, I love the ability to be able to go back and edit content as many times as is necessary, or just update what I have written. With print and email marketing, you don’t have that luxury. The funny thing is that you can write content that is 99.9% accurate, but one mistake and people notice.
I recently did a newsletter and had proofread it three times and had an associate check it as well. Somehow, we both missed a typo. The email went out to about 1000 clients, friends, and some family. While a lot of people didn’t mention it, a couple people did. ( I am sure others noticed it but were too polite to mention it)
In this case, as the error was in the link text of a URL, it wasn’t picked up by my spellcheck.
So for instance https://microsof.com wouldn’t be picked up as an error even though it is missing a “t” and Microsoft would be usually picked up in a dictionary.
My mistake was that although I read through it, the link in question was only one letter off and it got by me (and of course the spell check).
While this wasn’t a major mistake, to prospective clients, finding typos does not portray you in a good light.
So what can you do to prevent this from happening?
Read your posts out loud, sometimes that helps you to identify errors that look correct but are off, as in the case of the hyperlink I mentioned.
Make sure you click on all hyperlinks and make sure they are going where intended and to the target you have set. This is web design 101, and while I would never miss this creating a website, in my email software, it slipped by me.
Hold off on sending your email. Sometimes it helps to save your work and come back to it and read it again. So, perhaps wait until the next day, reread your email and then send it out.
Don’t be overly dependent on programs, like spellcheck. They are not infallible!
Bottom line:
When you are working on print or emails, remember once they are out there, they are out there forever. So, any mistakes you make cannot be fixed. Take the extra time needed and make sure there are no mistakes, either grammatically or even within your hyperlinks.
