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You may ask yourself why we include material on site maintenance in a course that deals mainly with search engine optimization, promotion, and marketing – isn’t this the job of the webmaster or site administrator? Remember the Integrated Approach considers site quality maintenance a secondary yet obligatory addition to your promotion campaigns and traffic analysis. The content of your website is the foundation upon which you build your online business. The higher the quality of this material, the more successful your business will be.
It is strongly recommended that you start your SEO campaign with a site quality assessment, especially in the following situations: - When you provide SEO / SEM services and are hired to promote a Web site already created by somebody else. In this case, you should work (if possible) in conjunction with the site development and administration team to properly prepare the Web site for the SEO campaign. The site quality reports you obtain with the help of Web CEO will be your starting point in organizing this teamwork.
- When you have just developed a Web site of a considerable size but cannot afford the time or resources to double-test every page and function.
- When a Web site you're working with uses a dynamic technology and/or is constantly changed and updated with new materials, products, news etc.
- When the Web site you're working with is developed, maintained and managed by a group of people on a regular basis. Even if the team is well coordinated, this usually means that site quality will still yield some gaps.
Site quality assessment means detecting and troubleshooting the two principal factors that ultimately determine your site traffic and visitor conversion: site visibility and usability. Remember your audience is always split into human visitors (the "visible" audience) and search engine spiders (the "invisible" audience). If your site isn't initially spider-compatible (has broken links, lacks META and TITLE tags and other elements important for the search engines), it means you're having visibility problems. It's recommended that you close these gaps before starting the advanced refinements suggested by Web CEO’s optimization advice. When you've removed all errors and breaches that could potentially damage your visibility, pay attention to the usability flaws: missing or incorrectly displayed images, broken links (these can frustrate not only spiders but human visitors also), missing JavaScript includes or CSS styles. The result of these types of usability problem are your site not displaying or functioning correctly. Finally, whether you’re a hired hand or running an SEM campaign for your own site, you may want to clean up the technical waste which emerges when a Web site has been on the Web for a long time or when it lacks proper supervision. This generally means orphaned files which are no longer included or linked to from anywhere and just clutter your hosting space. What you should remember - Site quality and functionality assessment is auxiliary to site promotion and traffic analysis, but in most cases is the best way start your SEM campaign.
- There are two major kinds of problems to watch for, corresponding to the two types of audiences that you are targeting: visibility problems (how your pages comply with spiders' needs) and usability problems (how suitable and convenient the Web site is for human visitors).
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