6 Tips To Keep Your Web Site Fresh & Relevant.
In my last blog, I referenced the importance of keeping your web site look and feel fresh and polished for both your prospects, but search engines as well.
I thought it would be helpful to illustrate some quick and often automated ways to keep your site looking relevant and fresh:
1.) Blog Feeds: If your web site has a blog, consider pulling a blog feed into your home page. The blog feed can list the last few articles that you have published in your blog. This helps both search engines grab new content, but also lets your web site visitors that you are keeping your web site relevant. There is nothing worse than seeing a web site with articles from New Years two years ago, it sends a signal to your prospects that you are outdated. Here’s the important part: you need to keep your blog current in order for this to work.
2.) News Feeds: If your web site is a bit more of an information / industry web site, you can also pull in various RSS feeds from news providers in your industry. As the news changes, so does your web site.
3.) Social Media. Is your company on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.? If so, add the social media icons to your web site footer or copy. This alerts site visitors that you are tuned in to the times. You can also pull your Twitter and Facebook news feeds into your web site. Again, the key here is updating the social media applications as well.
4.) Keep up with the times. Does your web site reek of Microsoft Front Page? Your web site should attempt to conform to newer design trends, for example, stressing simplicity over heavy graphics, etc.
5.) Keep your products and services updated. For example, if you are in the mortgage business, eliminate the mortgage loan types that you can no longer sell due to to changes in the marketplace. Keeping old and outdated products on your web site sends a clear signal to prospects.
6.) Copyright. Another one of my pet peeves is seeing an outdated copyright in the footer, for example, it’s 2009 and your web site says copyright 2006. That tells me that no one has touched your web site for three years….. Consider adding this line of PHP code to your footer, this will automatically keep your copyright up to date
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Keeping it fresh serves many purposes and you don’t need to spend a time of money doing so. Once you can get some automated processes built into your site, the rest can take care of itself. If you need some advice or want to discuss polishing up your web site, give me a call: 407-830-4550.
