What to consider when choosing a Website Maintenance Company?

A lot of people nowadays have their own web space – whether it is a blog or a website. Having your own website is a perfect tool in creating online presence and to increase your product or service sales. Personally, I have had my own website for my car parts and accessories for quite some time now. It actually took three months for the website to be launched and another two weeks to have it running smoothly without any glitches – a service offered by the web development company I had invested with. However, after a month, there were some problems with my website like slow downloading on mobile devices and I needed to update some of the products online. The problem is that the website company wanted to charge me for this as they consider this an extra service from them. I ended up asking someone, my nephew, to do the maintenance of my website. Good thing, he also works in a web development company and made a promise to do the maintenance from that moment. 

 

Web maintenance is really important. It keeps the website’s contents updated and organized as clients check it from time to time. It also helps in preventing any suspicious or attacks on the website. With this experience in web maintenance, here are some things that you need to know in finding professionals to do the work for you.

· Pricing

You have to make a clear agreement whether the maintenance is valid for a year or more. Price range can go cheaper when you let the company do the work for many years. Further, make sure to make price comparisons from different website maintenance companies before making a final decision.

· Services

What services are covered with the price? Does it include updating the website? Service improvements? SEO? You have to know what you are getting from the fee you are paying. Their services should address your maintenance needs.


· Know their plans

Aside from the services that covers the fees, ask them for other plans that can help improve your website. It is an advantage that there are more techniques or add-ons to be included to optimize the website.

· Check for experience

A quality service is determined with the number of years and happy customers. Find a company that has been in the business for more than three years. Check their records whether their clients are happy and satisfied with the services offered.

· Backup service

Servers can have their downtime and can affect the service of the website. With impatient customers, losing a valued customer is a huge problem. Always ask the website maintenance company about backup services when the system is down. It is important to always put a smile on the faces of customers to maintain their loyalty and trust.

Maintaining the website is important as your ranking on search engines can be affected. My catering service in my area had its worst times when my website was not updated and queries from customers were not addressed. To continue the success of your website and your business as well, find a company you can trust and be comfortable with in maintaining your own website.

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Mobilegeddon: How Alarming is it to SEO and Web Developers?

SEO specialists around the globe were in frenzy when Google announced “Mobilegeddon” last April. This Mobilegeddon would greatly affect how things were usually running on search engine optimization and web development. Certain changes on Google’s algorithm have changed that certain existing features on websites can make them lose their rankings or even bury deep. Hence, web developers have to update their created websites and make them fit to these changes. What exactly is the Mobilegeddon? Why it raised alarm to SEO and web developers?

 

The Mobilegeddon, as referred to many to what Google has done, is a change in Google’s ranking algorithm. There is now a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that SEO specialists and web developers have to take into consideration. This means that Google will include in its ranking the criteria of how mobile-friendly your website is. If it is not, then your website cannot be searched on the web, and as a result, you will lose your ranking. Why is Google doing this? Will these bring a lot of changes in a website? What should be done with the Mobilegeddon?

One reason is that Google wants to focus on giving mobile users an improvement to their mobile browsing experience a better experience. With the changes, Google has to have websites download fast on mobile devices. Since everybody is using a smartphone to access the Internet, it is best to have pages downloaded quickly for better browsing. Further, Google wants mobile browsing to be as good as browsing on a desktop. Users will be able to get the same interface to increase better mobile experience. This will be very essential for people to have all access to a websites feature right on their smartphones.

 

With these new changes in ranking a website, SEO specialist have to change their techniques in link building, tagging, and creating content for their websites. SEO specialists have to optimize their content for mobile to make sure traffic is still attained. Creating short and entertaining headlines is one way in optimizing content. In addition, the content’s structure and layout are easily read. Links built should be relevant to the site and not misleading. It must have keywords that are optimized to ensure that users are lead to the information they are looking for.

For web developers, they have to make sure that they design a website that can be loaded on mobile phones. Since the trend of people using the Internet on their mobiles has been increasing yearly, websites should be mobile-friendly. To check if a website is mobile friendly, visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ and key in the website’s address. Adjustments to the website’s responsiveness to such platforms have to be made. If not, the website will not be ranked and might lose its current rankings.

Mobilegeddon brings a new change in Google’s algorithms but this change is for the better. Keeping up with the trend, SEO specialists and web developers have to make changes to their websites to be ranked by Google. It is not a huge problem unless this is taken for granted and not considered for the betterment of the website.

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