Top 5 Tips to Keep Your Website Current

Keeping on top of the small details can have a massive overall effect on your website.

1) News features - News features are a fantastic way to communicate with visitors and customers on your website and let them know how well your business is doing. It helps keep your website looking up-to date to those visiting which is a good way of helping gain trust and reflecting your organisation in a positive light. Write about anything from new products or services, achievements, awards or just general helpful information. What you may find is that a customer may not have known you where selling a certain product or service until the news story was posted and it could increase your sales. Another tip when installing a news feature is internal linking; link the keywords you are targeting back to the relevant pages on your website as this helps you rank better in search engines if you have a search engine optimisation campaign and the more news stories you have, the more links you will have meaning you could get a higher volume of traffic coming to your website.

2) Monthly / Seasonal offers and promotions - Having things like "summer sale" or "July offers" on your home page will give an impression that you are constantly updating and are up-to date with what is going on. Obviously have them relevant to the current month or season. Your visitors will immediately think that if your website has the latest offers then response time will be fast and it gives an impression you are reliable, so constantly update these features. Also changing your logo slightly on special occasions keeps you looking current as well, things like adding hearts to your logo on Valentine's Day or snow at Christmas. Having a good web designer on board will help you achieve this.

3) Testimonials - Any feedback you get from a customer should be immediately added to your website. Whether it is a few words or a letter, have a special area of your website dedicated to customer opinion. People like to read of others experiences before they make up their minds. So having feedback is an excellent way of not only gaining trust but hopefully increasing sales.

4) Pictures - If you have a gallery on your website or pictures on the home page, try and update them often by either adding more to the gallery (most recent first) or changing the pictures on the home page. This is just a nice touch and helps spruce up your site and gives visitors something now to look at.

5) Blogging - Having a blog can be similar to having a news section except a blog is more personal and allows for visitor comments and feedback. You can talk more personally on a blog and talk about things other than news. Keep the blog up to date as you would with the news section as this shows you are active in your community and helps you create a personality for your business. A post once or twice a week is perfect as it keeps you current but you aren't spending all of your time updating it.

6) Social media - Having links to your Twitter and Facebook is also a good idea, this gives visitors the option to follow your updates from a more personal medium. You could also install a feed on your homepage with live updates of your status updates or Tweets. This is another good way of staying current. You only need one update about once a day through your social media channels but make sure they are interesting and relevant without boring your reader.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Haidee_Ross

Know your Page's Goal or Purpose before Writing

There are many reasons why it's good to develop content for your website. It gives the search engines more reasons to rank your site high. It informs potential customers, answers their questions and allays their fears about ordering products and services from you online.

And with the ever increasing importance of social media, developing content that's suitable for distribution through Facebook and other channels is another reason why it's good.

When preparing content for your site, you may be trying to rank for certain long-tail keyword for example.

While thinking about these reasons, many web copywriters may lose sight of another important, more fundamental goal of a webpage. And that is whether the purpose of a webpage is to entice someone to visit, return or continue looking for more on your site, or is the purpose to motivate someone to take action, whether that's clicking a 'buy' button or signing up for an e-newsletter for example.

Known as pulling or pushing, you have to determine this before you type even one word

Each of these types of pages is as different as night and day. Pages meant to "pull" someone in and keep them there are gifts of sorts whose purpose is to welcome and inform readers. These pages answer many of the readers' "how-to" questions among other things.

Pages written to "push" someone are written in a much different tone and have a much different purpose. They are for driving someone to take action. People looking at this content have likely seen the other type and they're near the point of purchase. Copy for these pages is generally more persuasive since you're trying to get them to make that click or close the sale.

All of this raises one question - aren't all pages supposed to be a little of each?

That's certainly possible and prudent to move readers from one page to the next. We all know the importance of including a "call-to-action" in your copy to keep the reader engaged ON your site.

Say you write an article about some feature of your product and how it's useful to solving a particular problem. If you fail to include a "call-to-action" and the reader gets to the end, they're not going to know where to go and therefore, leave your site.

But the big point is to understand the purpose of a page before writing it. Are you trying to entice new people into your site or are you trying to motivate them to take action? Don't simply go at it with the idea of giving the search engines some great content to gobble up.

This is an important question you need to answer before you even start writing (...or typing).

This article is taken from http://www.searchengineguide.com/stone-reuning/know-your-pages-goal-or-purpose-before-w.php