SEO and website maintenance

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process to improve the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engine using natural or un-paid search results as compared to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO targets different kinds of search like image search, video search and many more. This gives any web site its web presence.

Just making a great and attractive site does not serve the purpose. The website has to maintain periodically for it to make its presence on the web.

SEO revolves around two major processes, the on-site optimization and the off-site optimization. On-site optimization includes anything that you control on your site like the title tags, content, linking structure within your site and all other factors on your pages. Off-site optimization is everything else. This means all the links to your site from other sites on the Internet. In theory, you can't control off-site factors. So between on-site and off-site optimization your site's rankings are determined.

Optimization techniques are highly dependent on the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as so does the competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches. In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007. As of 2006, Google had an 85-90% market share in Germany. While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany. As of June 2008, the market share of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise. That market share is achieved in a number of countries

There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better recognition in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one big magic thing you can do to get a top placement at a search engine for your website, but you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select.

For each page you should come up with a list of no more than two key word phrases, each less than three or four words long. Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word "Software" for example, is ignored by many search engines - it is what they call a "stop" word, like "the" or "a" - they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotation marks or otherwise make it clear it is part of your search.

Website maintenance plays an important role in targeting enough traffic on your website and to make it profitable.

Updating the current content including company’s information, personal information and any other textual content of the website comes under website maintenance. It may include inserting new graphics depending on the industry the company operates. In order to make your website more popular from the competitors is how often you update your content. If search engine’s spider crawl your website every month and find nothing has changed, they are less likely to come back and index your website for search. Updating content on regular basis can remedy this situation and invite the search engine spiders to re-index your site more frequently.

The images on a website occupy most of the spaces. So it is utmost important to optimize these images so that they load faster on a customer’s browser page. It is a major part in web maintenance as it directly affects the loading speed and performance of your website.

Link validation is also a part of all web maintenance services. It includes microscopic scanning of all pages to ensure that there are no dead links.