Maintaining Your Website

I offer cost effective website maintenance services and customer support at affordable rates. In addition to building websites for clients, I also maintain them (whether or not I built the website). In most cases my site maintenance services are delivered as part of a close and long term relationship with a client. I have one simple maintenance plan. I charge $50.00 per hour, billed in half hour segments. An example would be removing old text, images or other elements, and replacing them with new content, adding new pages or updating menus.

Research shows that visitors are more likely to return to your website if it is updated frequently. Sites vary, but the idea that they can be left unattended while automatically generating sales or return visitors is really just not true. Search engines are particularly sensitive about current content. If a site stays dormant for too long, they consider the site to be stale, and will lower your page placement in the search result pages. Searchers and visitors want to see new content added regularly. Whether this is done weekly, bi-monthly or monthly, adding new content ensures your visitor will return, and searchers will keep your page results from slipping.

The majority of search engines are indexing web pages and moving away from meta tag only searches. That's why it is imperative to keep your website up to date to maintain good rankings. Little programs called spiders, crawlers or web bots go out daily to index websites. These programs save a your page to the search engines vast hard drives. When someone does a search, they look through their index of pages to find content that matches the persons search word or phrase, then displays that on their results page. Like visitors, if your searchers do not have fresh content added periodically, they tend to return less frequently. This may cause your page ranking to fall as they put fresher sites before you. This can be devastating if you are in a highly competitive market.