Website maintenance is an underestimated responsibility for website owners. A well-maintained website will benefit from major boosts in search engine page rank and will reduce bounce rate.

Visitors simply don’t stay on websites that are slow to load, difficult to read or hard to navigate.

A site that offers up-to-date information nurtures a visitor’s interest and keeps them coming back.

There’s much more to website maintenance than just a few updates.

What is Website Maintenance?

Website maintenance doesn’t only include visual updates to a portfolio, service, or product page.

Good website maintenance also involves adding news articles and blog posts, as well as media like images and videos.

There are also extra obligations like upholding a reliable SiteMap, link building, checking for dud links and keeping an eye out for broken images.

When left unresolved, these factors can harm a website’s page rank, so pay attention to them.

A simplified list of harmful crawl errors is:

• Site speed.
• Duplicate content.
• A lack of canonical URLs.
• Missing meta-tags.
• Lack of images.
• Dud links.
• Incorrect business details.
• Not adhering to latest design standards.

Website maintenance is essential to running a business, and a neglected site is likely to be penalised.

Search engine programmes called bots crawl sites, looking for updates and checking for errors. They send information back to the search engine, and the search engine indexes it as it sees fit.

Sites that have fewer crawl errors, plenty of backlinks, and regularly updated, fresh content are crawled and indexed more frequently.

Website Updates Help Website Rank

Files such as pages, posts and media are ‘date stamped’ when uploaded or saved on WordPress, meaning that search engines can detect when they were last edited.

They can also tell if significant changes have been made to those files – search engines compare the current version to the last crawled version. So minute edits, like a date or one word, will not suffice.

It makes sense to release a sizeable update as often as possible if you’d like a site to do well. At a minimum, update the site once each month.

Show the search engines that you are trying hard to please visitors by correcting errors and providing up-to-date information.

If your industry doesn’t require regular product or service updates, broaden your reach with a blog.

Here, we take you through website maintenance tasks that should be carried out regularly to help your business grow online.

Product, Services or Portfolio Updates

Search engines recognise an operational business through regularly maintained websites and social profiles.

To do well online, ensure your products, services, and portfolio are up to date on your website and social media accounts. Social platforms must always reflect a website.

Website Content

For a website to rank well, good content is one of the most important undertakings. Website content can mean video and images, as well as text in the form of blog posts, articles and pages.

Blogging

Content creates buzz around your site, earns natural backlinks, and provides search engines with fodder. Meaning the site appears in more searches.

Study your key terms. Research high-search-volume topics that are easiest to rank for, and then write informative posts around those targeted key terms.

Once your website is well-known and has strong domain authority, adopt high-search-volume terms.

Video and images – such as photos or infographics – can be used to strengthen pages.

Website Maintenance Scans

Once your site is full of amazing content, daily scans are essential for upkeep.

A website audit will highlight damaging crawl errors such as dud links, missing meta tags, canonical errors and duplicate content. All of which negatively affect page rank.

Duplicate, Missing and Unique Meta-tags

Meta tags are among the most basic yet most important parts of optimisation. When a search engine or AI engine crawls a page, the meta tags (in the head tag) are among the first snippets of code it encounters.

Search engines compare meta tags with page content and industry standards to ensure they are relevant.

The title and description tags are used on Search Engine Result Pages to encourage visitors to click through. When meta-tags are not provided, Google does its best to generate a title and description from your page’s content.

Meta-tags have a significant impact on search engine optimisation, and if you want your website to rank well, there is no reason to omit or duplicate them.

Duplicate Content

Do not repeat content or try to rank for the same keywords on any two articles. One of those articles will be penalised.

This principle was put in place to prevent underhand websites from gaining rank through duplicate content and keyword stuffing, which Google has cracked down on over the years.

Search engine crawlers want to find content easily, not wade through duplicated pages. By limiting any repeated content, your important articles are indexed.

Regular website maintenance scans with a company such as Moz help to stay on top of content that can be duplicated by accident.

If we find duplicates, we edit one of the articles and target the content around different key terms.

Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs are the true URL (or page) that you want listed on search engines. There is a meta-tag that can be used, especially to tell crawlers which is the true or original URL.

It exists because search engines can reach your page using many different URLs.

A URL could have a forward slash at the end, an https at the beginning or an http. We see them as the same page, but search engines see each as a duplicate page.

Canonicalisation helps to determine which page should be indexed, again taking some of the hard work away from the bot.

SiteMaps

As your content grows, be sure to keep your SiteMap in sync with the website structure and submit the latest version to The Search Console when new content is added.

SiteMap Pro is a tool that will quickly produce a SiteMap, but always check the outcome. Pages such as ‘noindex’ or ‘error pages’ may get listed. Pages such as these should not be included, as Google will flag them.

Only pages that you want indexed should be included.

Upload the file (s) to your hosting area and submit the SiteMap to Search Console.

Links for Optimisation

Linking Content

Link your content – article to article, page to page. Google prefers links within content, following the natural flow of a user. Do not hide links away at the bottom of a page.

Textual links should be built around key terms to give more juice.

Be generous and link out to external websites, especially when their content is relevant.

If a website owner properly analyses their site, they can identify sites that link to them, which is a great way to initiate relationships.

Link Checking

The internet changes rapidly. Websites move pages and update URLs constantly.

Dud links are a sign of neglect and something that Google penalises. Consistently check your site, using a website analysis tool, for links that no longer work. Correct any that are found.

Link Building

Domain authority is a term coined by MOZ that quantifies a domain’s popularity.

Links back to your site (or backlinks) are evidence of popularity. When Google sees natural backlinks to great content, the content is ranked higher.

Be sure that sites linking to yours have up-to-date business details.

Find the links to your site by searching Google, using an analytic tool like MOZ Pro and using the Search Console.

Site Design

Standards change as technology is modernised and used in different ways.

Google constantly updates its algorithms to weed out black-hat tactics and deliver the best user experience.

For example, Google rewards mobile-friendly websites that download quickly on a 4G connection.

Too many large images that take up space and push crucial content below the fold have a negative effect. These days, users want information FAST.

Your website design should always adhere to current standards.

Most small business websites are out of date within 5 years. Some are not even provided in accordance with quality guidelines.

Don’t despair! A lot can be done to bring a site up to specification. Contact Kaydee Web to arrange a chat.

Other General Website Maintenance

Pricing Structure

A clear, up-to-date pricing structure instils confidence in users and promotes an honest company, which Google loves to see.

Business Details

Google expects businesses to be transparent with users and will reward websites that are transparent about location, ethics, and policies.

Support

It helps to clearly display a telephone number or an email address so users can contact customer service and receive a response quickly.

Reviews

Online reviews are feared because they can quickly and easily credit or discredit a company. However, user-generated online reviews are highly valuable in search, sending positive signals to search engines.

Google’s intention to reward truly excellent businesses is evident in its focus on reviews.

Not to mention that there is a lot of buying power behind reviews.

The Duties of a Website Manager

Hopefully, we’ve clarified the necessary time and effort required for website maintenance when planning to scale a business. It’s not an easy task, but for marketers and tech-creatives, it is an enjoyable process.