How To Drive More Traffic by Performing Website Maintenance

In order to protect your home do you spend time making sure everything is in repair? If you ran a shop would you take extra time making sure all your equipment is operating correctly? Operating a website is no different than maintaining a shop or taking care of your home, except for the fact that you're expecting thousands of important visitors every day. But what makes for a "ship shape" website? Is there some sort of routine maintenance you should perform? This Post will cover a few tips to make your site run smoothly and let your visitors feel comfortable enough to stick around.

One of the common problems site visitors come across is old, broken links. If you have linked to an outside source you might do well to check from time to time and make certain that link is valid. This is especially true if your link is to a particular page or a blog entry as these are famous for getting switched; the site and the entry might still be there, but if something about the link changes your visitors won't be taken where you wanted them to go. Some types of web sites are more likely to come and go, so you'll have to judge from experience how often to check for broken links. Internal links are just as likely to break, especially if you have links to photos or audio files; when you make a change to some element of your web site, think through the links you might have affected.

There are several online tools that can help you to check for broken links. Two of them are free and they provide a great service. You'll find them at http://validator.w3.org/checklink and http://www.dead-links.com/ If you're interested in a free software that works on your desktop, you'll find Xenu's Link Sleuth at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Another way to maintenance your site is doing what we'll call "fixing leaks in the pipe". It's likely that you have certain things you want your site visitors to do, whether it is to visit an affiliate link, your own product, or sign up for a newsletter. The route from a customer's arrival at your site to the action you want them to perform is often called your "pipeline". Check for leaks in your pipeline since a leaky pipe could provide a place for you to lose potential customers.

Here are a few places your visitors might leak out from and never return to your site:

Do each of your subscription forms lead back to your site?

Are you using custom "thank you" pages or depending on autogenerated ones? Auto-generated thank you pages might not lead back to your site.

Have you customized your error pages with links back to working parts of your site? If a customer finds a missing page and ends up on a default "404 error" page, you may never see them again.

Are you giving away your traffic to web rings and link exchanges that don't have easy-to-find links back to your site?

Keep the little maintenance tasks under check so you don't miss any visitors and never underestimate the power of these little tricks. After all, competition is high on any traffic building campaign and it is small details what makes a difference.