If you've gotten your site up and running good for you. Unfortunately, a web site like a car occasionally needs maintenance. In order for your website to be a success you must maintain it. If you expect visitors to come back and revisit your site, you have to provide them with something new, correct your errors and keep your site up to date.

Site Maintenance Tasks

• Make sure you are registered with the major search engines. Revise your pages, metal data, and re-submit your pages as needed.

  Register your site again with the major search engines if you:

  • Change your URL.
  • Change the title of your listing.
  • Add new pages
  • Change the content of a Web page.
  • Change your description and/or keywords.
  • Require an additional or different categories for your listing.
  • Change your e-mail address

• Continue to List Your Site. Submit your main page (index or home page) to as many directories and search engines as you can. Every time you browse the Web and come upon a new directory or search engine list your site. Check out my reference pagefor additional search engines and directories to submit your site to.
  Search Engines     Local Listings

• Continually monitor your site rankings and continue to work on your site to get higher listings for your key words.

  Axandra provides Internet Business Promoter (IBP). IBP is the award-winning web site promotion software tool that helps you to get more customers and more sales with high search engine rankings. Optimize your web pages for a high search engine ranking and track your progress over time. Get more customers and more sales. Internet Business Promoter makes it easy for you. The Lite edition is freeware. IBP Site Promoter

  Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain. Wordtracker compiles a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and are told how often people search for them, and also tell you how many competing sites use those keywords. Wordtracker helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service - many of which you might never have considered. Investigate this handy service Wordtracker

  Good Keywords is free software for finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages. Knowing the right keywords to target is very important because your site should provide what people are searching for.

  If you take your Web promotion seriously, Web CEO is the solution for you. With Web CEO you will be able to:

  • research your keywords
  • optimize your site for high rankings in search engines
  • submit your URLs to search engines
  • check your rankings with search engines
  • analyze your visitors with live traffic analysis
  • pinpoint broken links and other errors on your site
  • edit your Web pages in the WYSIWYG mode
  • upload HTML and other files to your server
  • monitor your website to know if it is up or down

  NetMechanic Power Tools for Your Web Site help drive traffic to your site and keep it there with three simple steps.

  • Improve Your Site
  • Promote Your Site
  • Monitor Your Site

• Continue to promote and advertise your website locally and on the internet.

• Monitor and continue to get links to your site from other sites.
  Need some help finding quality sites to exchange links with or sites that are linking to your competition ? Arelis a software product provided by Axandra has a decent free version that helps make the job a little easier. While visiting the Arelis web site be sure to get your free Link Popularity E-book.

  Download this free software to check and compare your link popularity with your competition. Link Popularity Check

• Monitor the number of visitors to your site
  A nice free counter that I use is provided by Extreme Tracking.

• Monitor your web hosting service
  All hosting services are not created equal. Monitor your site in order to be sure that your site is accessible. SiteProbe is a free tool that monitors the status of your website and hosting service hourly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. SiteProbe

• Check your site for "dead" links
  Xenu's Link Sleuth (free tool) will check your internal and external links and images.

• Continue to search for and develop quality content. Content is what brings your visitors to your site in the first place. If your pages aren't updated and new content isn't added, your Website will become stagnant.

• Future Enhancements (if you don't already have them on your site)
  • Custom 404 Page
  • Add ebooks or other special files that your visitors can download
  • Provide visitors the capability of book marking your site
  • Add a Tell A Friend Capability
  • Publish a newsletter and provide the capability (form) to subscribe
  • Site search engine
  • New graphics and logo
  • Buttons
  • Sticky Content
  • Improved Menu System
  • Investigate and add scripts to your site

If you made it to here - Congratulations ! You're hopefully well on the way to being a successful webmaster. Don't stop with just this tutorial. Continue to read ebooks and take tutorials to improve your skills. See my reference page for additional books and tutorials.