Matt Marg

Todd A. Polter asked:


In the past two articles that discussed the issue of website optimization we reviewed the site as it should be, and the way you will inform the world of the fact that your site is actually online and accessible. This last articles in the series of three will discuss one last step to take in the promotion of any website, as well as any online business, site development and its targets.

Site development is a natural part of its life cycle, just like everything else the site needs to grow and expend, if the site is about a particular product it could evolve as the product changes to meet the market expectations, if the site is informational by nature it could update as time passes and more new things are discovered. The first thing to realize is that almost no site should be left alone once it has been first published, and that almost every site that devotes energy into development gets rewarded in one way or the other.

As you complete the first phase of your site launch try and think what the next steps could be, what other issues and points you would like to address and what thoughts would you like to share with your audience or clients. These ideas and thoughts are the building blocks of your next site update, you will need to think about how you can expand ideas to serve as categories and sub categories, how to create new and interesting content or media for your visitors.

Creating a video category for a site can be a very exciting thing, you could post a few videos of your office or the product manufacturing process, you could record a business presentation and discuss it over audio and you can implement a comment script that will allow you to engage in conversation with your visitors. This could improve your understanding of who are the people that visit your site, what do they expect to find there and how your pages can create a better user experience for them.

From the search optimization point of view you should make sure that the site structure does not become overloaded with links to new pages, as the sites grows in pages focus on easy homepage navigation so visitors could easily find the section of the site they want to visit, once in that category page they could start browsing around, just like they used to do from the home page, when the site was relatively smaller.

Making sure your pages are indexed and crawled will be an ongoing task for you as a webmaster or site owner, there are no shortcuts here if you want to make sure you have a good chance at ranking well on search engines, go over your site cache on the major search engines and find pages with difficulty to be indexed and ranked, take care of these pages and make changes to them and to other pages that link to them until the problem is solved, do not go into a new development phase without making sure all your indexation issues are solved.

Developing your site shows commitment not only to the search engines, visitors will also notice that there is always something new in your site and that it is up to date and current, slowly building a massive and valuable site you will have a much better chance at good ranking.