A Wise Investment: A CMS to Maintain Your Site
Today, very few businesses can get away with having a static site that never gets updated. If you want your website to generate revenue, rather than just look pretty, it's essential that yours is able to be easily updated. You can pay a firm by the hour or on retainer to do the updates for you, but the easier, and more economical, way to go about it is to invest in a content management system (CMS), which can be used by novices to add, modify and remove content.
Why is keeping your site updated so important?
It helps search engine rankings. Earlier this year, Google activated its new infrastructure change entitled “Caffeine,” which rewards sites for having fresh content. Regularly publishing content on your site is a great way to keep web crawlers coming back frequently. And the more quality content you have on your site, the more links it will likely get from relevant sites and blogs. Inbound links are of one of the main ways Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines judge a site's quality.
It keeps people coming back. Why would anyone keep visiting a site that never has anything new to offer? If you keep your site updated, you can continue driving consumers to it through email newsletters, social networks, RSS feeds and other methods. This, of course, keeps your brand fresh in their minds and increases the likelihood of them spending money with your company down the line.
It lets visitors know you're thriving. If the latest item you have posted is an announcement from 2006, visitors are going to rightfully wonder whether you're even still in business. With a lack of evidence, they may hit the backspace key and visit your competition instead. As a side note, it's best to avoid language that ties content down to a specific date if it is going to remain static. (Instead of “10 years ago,” use “since 2000,” since that statement will always remain accurate).
It's easy! It used to be difficult for non-coders to update a site's content, but that's no longer the case. There are a number of user-friendly CMS's available, many of which are open-source and not subject to licensing fees. It is important to ensure the platform you choose has a decent-sized development community and that it's designed with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.
If you need help converting your site to a CMS, feel free to contact us by calling (603) 529-8175!
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written by Matt S., August 16, 2010
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