Keep Your Web Site Up to Date - Here's Why

Web sites should be reviewed at least once a year for content, design and findability. Upon researching the latest in search engine optimization and reviewing numerous business web sites, it becomes an easy conclusion. Here’s why:

Many Sites Have Out-Of-Date Information

This is a simple one, nothing technical about it. Without a review, sites can end up with out-of-day, incorrect information.

Evolving Best Practices

Search engines have evolved over the years. How search engines rank sites and even which search engines are most popular has changed. When I first started my business, Yahoo was the tops along with AltaVista. Overture started the first pay-per-click program. Now Yahoo owns them both, and Google is the big kid on the block with its own pay-per-click program. Yahoo and MSN remain big players, too.

And the technology for designing sites has changed. In 1999 (ancient history in internet time), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) was just a promise that very few browsers supported. Today, there’s fairly solid support among the major browsers.

What does all this mean? Nowadays, we can control precise layout and appearance of a site better than we could back then, and sites can be more streamlined. Without getting technical, today we can remove a lot of extra formatting from web pages… colors, font sizes and a lot of the layout information. So files designed with CSS are smaller and more readable by search engines.

Another Factor: Current computer monitors are bigger and handle more colors than in the past, so pages can be wider now than five years ago, and we’re no longer limited to “web-safe” colors.

This site is an example of a site formatted almost exclusively with CSS.

Site Maps

Google and Yahoo now offer site map submission for free. Site maps list all the pages on your site, and the search engines can use them to navigate and map your site.

Google’s site map is in XML format. (Yeah, a techy acronym. Suffice it to say that it has to be in a specific format.) The file is posted to your site, and Google periodically reads that file for updates. Yahoo accepts XML in a different format or TXT files.

Google Analytics

Currently in Beta testing, Google offers free analysis of visitors to your site. It’s particularly useful if you have an AdWords account with Google.

But Wait, There’s More – Better Ranking On Search Engines

To place higher in search engine rankings, there are a few key points that should be reviewed and adjusted at least yearly.

• Content: Write lots of relevant text for your site.
• Back Links: The more sites that link to your site, the better you’ll do in some search engines.
• Modification Date: Pages that have been modified recently can place a little higher than sites with older dates (all things being equal). There are some exceptions depending on the specific search.
• Competition: Other sites are always coming online. It’s worth a little time studying the sites that rank higher for your keywords and tweaking your site.
• Some Hidden Issues: And there are things like the page title, meta tags, alt tags, robots.txt files…hidden pieces of your site…that play a role with search engines.

Conclusion

• If your site is older than a few years, consider a redesign or a yearly review of your content and search engine optimization.
• If it’s been longer than three years since your site was created, I highly recommend a redesign.
• If it’s been longer than five years, your site almost certainly needs a redesign.

By the way, I've found at least one site that we created six years ago, and it remains at the top of Google’s free listings. That business has a very niche product, so if you’re lucky enough to have such a business, this may not be as applicable to you.

You get the idea. There have been some significant changes to search engines and browsers over the years. What was once best practice may no longer apply today.

If you get any part of your business from your web site or you want to get more, it’s an ongoing effort. Even if you want to be found for narrowly targeted keywords, you should review your ranking once or twice a year and tweak your site to mimic those sites that place high for those keywords.

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