Make your business website up to date and attract more visitors
Website is a norm for today’s world. It can take the form as a business/corporate website, a personal website or even as an informative website. Without any doubt, the ‘triple-w-dot-something'(www.x) is a powerful communication and marketing tool.
Many of us will see our business/corporate website as a once-off project. Not many of us will spend time and effort in the maintenance and information updating of the website. Hence, the website may not reflect your business nature correctly nor will it contains the latest news or projects or products that your company has just completed or launched. Bearing in mind, a website can serves as a gateway or as a sales channel for your business. Hence, it’s worth spending sometime and effort in its maintenance.
5 simples things to keep your website up-to-date at all times.
# 1: Check all external links.
Ensure all external links on your websites are active. It’s not very nice to have outdated or dead links lying around on your pages. It will gives poor image for those who comes to your site.
There are a lot of tools that will do this checking for you. As an example, Xenu Link Sleuth. It will give a report at the end of the check to say which links are okay, which have been moved, and which are dead.
You can find other tools from Google directory, http://directory.google.com for computers, software, Internet, site management and link management.
# 2: Update new product or services as they are launch.
Remember to update your site as soon as a new product or service has been released. This will consume little effort if you do it immediately following the release rather than if you drag for a while (it can be a few days or weeks or even months). By then you will have difficulty in recalling the details of the product or the service that has been launched. Always give your site visitor the latest picture of your business.
# 3: Browse your site every 6 months.
Go and browse your site as if you are new to the website. See it with a fresh pairs of eyes and mind. Asking questions like ‘Does the website contain the latest product/service list?’, ‘Is the website ‘good-looking’?’, ‘Does it take long to download from the website?’, ‘Are the links on the pages appropriately placed?’ etc.
With constant update and maintenance work, a website can become some sort of a spaghetti junction. It is useful to check out these pages on a regular basis to look for any problematic areas and get them fix.
The above practices can be done at your own set time. I would say the most effort consuming task among the 3 will be the last one, i.e. browsing the site. So, be prepared to set aside at least half a day for it. But you need not do this very often, may be once every half yearly. For the first 2 tasks, the effort spend is considerately less, hence it can be done as frequent or as the need arises.
#4 : Create a Video to Get Customers
Convert a slideshow of your products into a video and upload it to Youtube or MetaCafe. Be sure to optimize your title and descriptions to get the most traffic from search engines. Set up your own channel on Youtube. With YouTube hosting your video and supplying the bandwidth, embed the video into your website. The link from YouTube will get more customers to your website.
#5 : Try Pay per Click Advertising to Get Customers to Your Website
No, Pay Per Click advertising is not free, but it can be very inexpensive. Signup is free. When people search for the products you sell, your PPC business ad will appear on the search engine report. With PPC, you only pay when a customer clicks on your ad and comes to your website. Each customer who comes to your website costs you only a few pennies. You can set your advertising budget as low as $1 per day, and turn your ad campaign off and on whenever you wish. You can easily track your Pay Per Click customers to see if PPC brings you more sales. The largest PPC advertising networks are those with the most popular search engines: Microsoft Ad Center, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Google Adwords.
Most search engines will find your website eventually. However, it doesn’t harm to give it them a little helping hand. To let a search engine like Google know that your site exists you need to tell it the URL so that it can find you and visit the pages on your site to discover new and updated pages.
The best way to help Google, Bing and Yahoo find your site is to submit a sitemap.