When was your website last updated?

Lets see the hands of you who have visited a website recently, and the content is painfully out of date..  If this weren't a virtual media,  you'd see quite a few hands. Stale sites are commonplace, and it can have a pretty negative affect on how that business is viewed by potential customers. Remember that a website is sometimes the first opportunity that a business may have to convince the potential customer that they are serious, and know their stuff. However, if the content is stale, then it can have a pretty crippling impact on how well it works as a marketing tool.  Little known facts... having stale content on your website can: <ul> <li>Cause your existing links in search engines to drop in relevance.  On top one month, and on page 3 the next?</li> <li>Cause your potential customers to think that you are not really serious about your business - or worse, that you've gone out of business!</li> <li>Affect the confidence of your potential customers in how well you'll manage THEIR business, if you can't seem to manage your own!</li> <li>Cost you an opportunity to sell or speak on a current topic or product  - when your competitors appear to be on top of things.</li></ul> "Stale" content is defined differently based on your industry, and how quickly it can change. Some websites can be updated once a month with satisfactory results. Others require less frequent changes, especially if the purpose of that site is simply data sharing. Essentially though, a business needs to be updating their website on a somewhat frequent basis to keep the search engines happy, and their clients as well.  Because we're talking about a virtual media (typically there is no person-to-person contact to help qualify or close a sale), its important to consider finding ways to keep bringing clients back to a site so that the business is constantly in the front of their minds. Have a monthly blog Have a "Tip of the Week" Have a monthly special/coupon Perform product reviews Consider a video snippet - a TV ad of sorts Well thats all fine and dandy, you may say. But even if you had a great idea for frequent updates to your site, perhaps you have no time, or skills to do web-stuff.. how can you maintain your site content better? If you have the right tools in place, site maintenance can become very quick and easy to do. Some of these tools might include the following: <ul> <li>Buy a program specifically designed for quick and easy updates to your site. A lot of these programs look and work like Word.</li> <li>Hire a web developer on a month-to-month basis so you can just email changes to them, and not have to think about it. This can be more affordable than you might think.</li> <li>Have tools built into your existing website to allow you to dynamically make content changes on the fly, anytime and from anywhere. There is usually an up-front cost for this work, but then there's no ongoing fees after the fact.</li></ul> Ultimately it doesn't really matter how you choose to make these changes, but it DOES matter that changes get done. Even small changes helps support your company image, and customer confidence. 2008-09-10T22:35:47Z