Just like knowing the basics of repairing your own home helps you to save money and complete regular repairs faster, having an understanding about the basics of maintaining your own website can also speed up productivity, without raising maintenance costs. Granted, this would be easier to do if you are someone who has the technical know-how, but there are still things a non-technical person can do to maintain his/her site instead of relying on professionals for every little thing. Let’s find out what you can do when coding isn’t your strong suit.
Update, Correct and Upload
Uploading regular content is a must if you don’t want your site’s Google rankings to fall. However, it is also important that you check for rudimentary mistakes such as typos, grammatical mistakes and punctuation errors. The last thing you want is for visitors to avoid your site because of bad grammar and poor editing. Also, update outdated posts to make them more relevant to the present.
Learn Basic SEO
We are not talking about the expert stuff here, although learning that can only help. Here are a few tips that will help you out nevertheless.
- Optimize your titles and descriptions to match popular keywords
- Use catchy (cheesy does work at times) titles and SERP text descriptions
- Learn a bit about URL formatting so that your website doesn’t look untidy on the SERPs
- Register the site with Google webmaster tools
- Make your site faster by removing old images and JavaScript files that you don’t need anymore
Back It Up
With so many cloud services available now, be sure to sign up for one of them so you don’t lose all your data and your work if your site crashes for some reason. Be regular about it.
Learn to Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers such an easy way to track all the stats related to your website’s performance and traffic that every site owner should at least know the basics of how to operate the tools. Google Analytics gives you detailed info about the traffic on your site and how much progress each of the pages on the website is making in terms of traffic and revenue generation.
Stay in Touch with Your Readers/Customers
In case you have a blog, read the comments and the feedback. Try to reply to as many of them as possible. By staying in active touch with your readers, you will generate more useful traffic. Besides, multiple unanswered comments reflect poorly on your site’s outlook. If you have a customer base, make sure that the customer service team is in direct touch with the customers. Though this isn’t exactly technical, it’s an essential part of maintaining your site’s reputation.
It is important to understand your limitations and that’s exactly why you should stay out of the coding and designing aspects, unless you know what you are doing. Let the experts handle that part and concentrate instead on what you do know or can learn easily.
