A website with continuously fresh content brings return visitors while poor maintenance sends the visitors away. Website maintenance means you keep all your webpages, pictures, images, and links working properly at all times. To do it you have to check your own webpages regularly. How often to do it depends on the kind of content you have.

People's expectations and perceived needs continue growing, which leads to increased demands for more information.

Some webpages are like the "final truth" - no more additions, no changes. Don't start changing something only because you yourself gets tired of looking at the same content all the time. There are other webpages where some data will change, something new happens and has to be included. Especially if any of your contact details happens to change, those should immediately be changed or added to your webpage.

Because your website is a marketing tool the maintenance reflects directly on your or your company's reputation. Your reputation is what makes your efforts succeed or fail in the long run. Shouldn't you maintain your reputation, i.e. include website maintenance in your reputation management. If you don't maintain your website it will produce a negative effect. With simple HTML you can learn in 10 minutes how to change something in your text and especially how to find the correct place in the code.

I have seen some website designer's own webpages where the code was more than half of the code page. That happens quite often when the designer uses CSS. With such a long code it takes too long before the visitor can see any content on his/her screen and the code is difficult for a human to read and therefore also difficult to change.

With an ever increasing number of personal and "official" blogs on the Internet these have to be considered. Have you reserved time / resources to follow-up on what your customers and competitors say about you in their blogs? If not, get advice on how to increase the effectiveness of your reputation management. With Google Alerts you can monitor both blogs and websites, you'll get an alert into your e-mail box whenever anybody has mentioned you or your company. You choose what keywords to follow.

Website maintenance means that you always give the correct information to your visitors. In case somebody attacks you / your company or criticizes you, you need to fix the problem immediately or at least try to remove negative results as much as possible and as fast as possible.

But if company policy can be stated as: leader communication with employees is a waste of time, the same policy tends to be a general one. It will spill over to also include potential customers. An other result is often a "dead" website. That's when a company or a organisation have a website only because "everybody else" have one. But to keep the website alive - that's regarded as a waste of money and time.

Despite your best efforts to maintain your on-line reputation, sooner or later your good name will come under fire. With so many blogging nowadays especially criticism and bad rumours are spreading very fast. To minimize the effect or even turn it into your favour requires very fast response. Marketing Pilgrim has published some advice and tips in addition to his earlier article: Free guide to reputation management on the Internet.

To top it off The Marketing Pilgrim has, except for the obvious - like your name, your company name and brand / brands - listed 8 more items to track and follow.

Example: The explosion on the semi-submersible oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 and the subsequent large and persistent oil spill gives an extremely good example of planned reputation management. British Petroleum ( BP ) and Transocean ( US contractor ) opened a special website covering the disaster: Gulf of Mexico - Deepwater Horizon Incident. Except for the two companies directly responsible also many of the government agencies looking to get the situation under control are involved in the website.

The website has been made as a multimedia effort involving also social media to offer immediate and correct information for those who are now or later might be hit by the evolving events. The website have links to related pages on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

What is Website Maintenance ?

Both search engine spiders and Internet surfers ( your visitors ) want to see a well maintained website before they take you seriously. This means regular up-dates of both content and outgoing links. These are the two points most easily noticed by your visitors.

Website maintenance is everything you need to do to present your visitors with fresh and up-dated content, may be even new ideas:

- up-dating of details: prices, addresses, tel. numbers, etc.
- modifying and/or adding fresh content,
- new webpages and/or pictures, photos, or images,
- adding or removing webpages,
- correcting old links and/or adding new ones,
- any other details that need to be changed.

Sometimes the text on an "out-dated" webpage can be changed into an article and then archived under a different file name, i.e. a new webpage for the search engines. The "old" file name should stay, with a slightly different content, as long as the page file name covers that content also.

Once you have optimized your website / webpages you should keep them optimized. People's tastes and fashions change over time - that is, technical matters change relatively fast, while people's opinion's and subconscious reactions change very slowly. If the fashion in your industry sector is regularly changing shouldn't you then adapt also your website to these changes. So optimizing taken in a long view is very much a question of maintenance.

Website maintenance is not only up-dating old data but improving on the current content without changing the overall outlook of the webpages.

Changing Search Engine Rankings

In July/August 2007 Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com started implementing "Universal Search" - or as some call it "Blended Search". It is a combination of different kinds of data on same search results page in response to a single query. For instance, a list of regular webpages mixed up with video clips, company press releases, some news from a newspaper or news vendor, and some other sources.

To implement this the search engines have to change their ranking algorithms. This means, not only are different kinds of data ranked together but it changes also what pages will show on the first results page because there is now more data to choose from.

If your page was before number 8-10, may be now it drops to second results page, if you don't adjust the content on your website. That's right, all content on your website gets important for each query, not just single webpages any more.

In addition titles and descriptions get more important for attracting visitors to click on your title / description. When writing your descriptions try to focus on your visitor's viewpoint and then you connect all webpage descriptions in your website so they clearly belong to the same "content family". Even if "universal search" isn't fully implemented yet, it's better to start preparing your website for it as soon as possible.

The search engines also differentiate between often and not-so-often updated webpages / websites. The effect on rankings can be difficult to notice, because there is also a delay in making crawled pages available for searchers. These delays are different for the different search engines. Generally on can say, the more regularly and often a website is updated, the faster the up-dates affect the rankings. See abstract of report.

Keep Outgoing Links Alive

If you have some or a lot of links to other websites or webpages giving more information and you leave them as they are for 6 months, I can almost guarantee at least one of them will die. Especially if your links are to specific webpages it happens that some can get shuffled around (= new internet address = URL) and your link is broken = dead.

URL = United Resource Location = Website or webpage Internet address including http://

To help monitoring your outgoing links go to: free link scan. With this online scan you can check 10 pages per hour or 50 pages per day for free. The link scan gives code line numbers, which makes it easy to correct your code when you use a HTML editor that also gives the line numbers.

If your links are spread over many webpages you can download Xenu's Link Sleuth for free, a links checking program [0.8 MB] ( also available in German ). This program can check all your outgoing links every day if you want, as well as any other site's links page. Together with the "wine program" Xenu works also on Linux.

Xenu checks maximum 999 outgoing links. If you have several banners and/or traffic data collectors ( visitor statistics-counters ) it will reduce the number of "real " links that are included. In such a case Link Valet is more suitable. It's an online links checker doing both internal and external links - checking up to 1.000 links. Those pages not check are listed at the bottom. The "Valet doesn't read PDF documents. Because it's an automated program you should manually check every error reported before you delete any link. The final result is by webpage so it's relatively easy to find the error links on your own pages.

Redirects - temporary (302) and permanent (301) - are clearly marked. Of course, you need to change the URL according to the 301 redirects. Especially if your links point to specific webpages ( deep linking ) I would suggest that in addition to the regular links check, you manually check the content at every destination. As link URL can change, the content can change as well. You should check the content at least once per year.

Then there is Dead Links links checker. Checks up to 15.000 internal and external links for free. The program indicates number of external and internal links for each one of your webpages, but it doesn't report broken links by webpage. So, with a big number of links it's somewhat difficult to find the broken links on your site. Except if you have memorized on which page each link is.

Change "Out-dated" Content

If you have dead links and partly outdated content your visitors will go away and never come back. Presently the search engines will also start dropping your page(s). When you maintain your pages continuously, why not let your visitor know when last up-dated? Such a note will induce confidence in your site - if it's not too long time ago. I have seen some data suggesting an average of 6-7% of total links on a links page are broken, but I have seen many links pages with 20-25% broken links.

Read what Google says about the importance of freshness for the ranking of webpages.

When you get over 25 long text pages it can be difficult to remember everything you have written. You could then run into problems, may be forgetting to up-date every detail. To assist your memory you can print out your text or see Don Pedro's Cascading Style Sheets - Pro and Con, which also discusses content management and desk top search.

Keep your Keywords Fresh

If you have researched your keywords and key phrases and then selected the most popular ones this month, they will not stay so popular for ever. As time goes by people's needs change, new problems pop-up or old problems gets viewed from a new viewpoint - in a new light. In other words, old problems need new solutions.

This change of trends and opinions plus added search experience changes people's search behaviour so they will use new search words or phrases or new variations of the old ones. It's therefore necessary to renew your keyword research, may be every six months. An increasing number of competitors means a decrease of the efficiency of some of your keywords so you have to change some or all of your webpages to adapt to the new situation.

According to Google's statistics about 20-25% of search queries are new, i.e. never seen before. One reason is longer search phrases, which gives more variation. All of this means you have to follow your traffic statistics and check for new search terms or changing trends.