Website Maintenance- How to Maintain Your Website After You Launch It!

Maintenance is essential whether it applies to your car, your garden or your website. A successful website requires ongoing maintenance so it can attract, educate and expand its client base and generate revenue for your business. This means a website is never completely finished. It is a work in progress just like keeping your garden weed free and producing food for your dinner table.

Simply having a website is not enough. If you expect consumers to find your web site… and consistently return to your website, you must provide them with new and useful content to keep them engaged. You can accomplish this by providing useful tips and information about topics related to your business on your website. Write articles or manage a blog that focuses on topics you know a lot about that also relate to your business.

In today’s world it is the norm that a prospective customer visits your website before contacting you. In many cases they will already have a good idea about your company, products, services and how it will serve their needs before you directly speak to them. It’s imperative that you provide them with useful content that will help guide them to doing business with you. Ensure your website content is up-to-date and relevant by regularly maintaining your website.

The most important benefits of website maintenance are that it:

• Ensures your website is up to date


• Keeps your customers updated with the latest information about your company


• Makes search engine spiders happy and increases your chances for higher search engine rankings


• Enhances your marketing and promotional actions


• Provides information about who's linking to your site


• Improves your company’s brand image and aids in expansion


• Helps to solve and monitor possible operational problems and avoids potential catastrophes with clients

Seven useful tips for maintaining and keeping your website updated:


1. The main goal for maintaining your website is to keep your visitors coming back and attracting new consumers. If your site is not updated regularly, visitors will not bother to return. They need the latest and new information or resources to return back and find you. Hence, it is essential that you have fresh new content added regularly to your website.

2. Keeping track of your visitors’ activity on your website is essential. Website traffic analysis and statistics will help you plan more systematically for future business offerings and online activities. Try and use these statistics to your advantage and improve the features and pages where consumers visit the most.

3. Create a forum which allows your visitors to interact with each other and meet new people. This is a great way to increase the popularity of your website.

4. Create an e-newsletter which should contain articles, tips and tricks. This allows you to tell your visitors what's new on your website, inform them about special deals, and any promotional, educational or newsworthy events.

5. Incoming links are very important for ranking higher in the search engine marketing game; therefore, try to build strong incoming links. Keep track of all these incoming links and check back on these links regularly to make sure they still have your link on their webpage especially if you have agreed to participate in a reciprocal link exchange program where you are linking back to their website. The Internet is constantly evolving; if you have outgoing links on your website to other sites and they no longer work, search engines will penalize you for broken links.

6. Provide a form where all web users have the opportunity to provide feedback and suggestions for your site. Accept any feedback you have received seriously and reply as soon as possible. Feedback given to you by your visitors will help you provide more targeted content and provide you with better ideas for improving your website.

7. In addition to your website content, the design of your website is very important. The most critical thing to keep in mind is to keep it simple, easy to use but appealing. Research other popular sites and high ranking competitor web sites for content and design ideas.

It’s never a good idea to build your website and believe it’s a finished product once you’ve decided to go live on the internet. Just having a website is not enough as the Internet is constantly evolving with new ideas and technology. So should your web site evolve to capture new traffic and provide a compelling reason for consumers to return to and patronize your business. Whether you take the time to regularly update and maintain your website yourself or seek the services of a professional web development company to do it for you, remember it’s a vital part of being successful on the Internet. Best of luck!

Steve Kozyk<
CEO/Founder ITegrity
skozyk[at]itegritygroup.com
www.itegritygroup.com

Alexa Toolbar- How to Add it to Your Browser and Why You Want to Do It

A web browser toolbar is of great help for people who frequently surf the Internet for information.  Toolbars do not eliminate the work of searching. Instead, they assists in cutting your browsing time significantly so that you can devote more time to do what you want to with the information you gather.

There are numerous tools available on the Internet to help online surfers with web searching. One of the most valuable and useful tools is the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa was founded in April 1996 and was designed to provide an interactive web navigation system.

Did you know that Alexa is owned by Amazon.com? It is also possible to make your own personalized Alexa toolbar with your Amazon.com affiliate code. The valuable information about a webpage, and of course a complete website, provided by Alexa is truly amazing.

So, how do you add an Alexa toolbar to your browser?

It’s very simple. First, go to Alexa.com, then click Download Alexa Toolbar at the top right hand corner of the page. Next click on the install option provided on the following page. After you've finished installing, the toolbar will appear across the top of your browser.

There are two main features offered by Alexa toolbar:

1. Traffic Ranking: One of the most helpful features provided by the Alexa toolbar is traffic ranking of any website. Alexa toolbar tracks how people use the Internet and turns this information into ranking statistics for each site on the Internet. By now, most web marketers know that the Alexa.com ranking of their site is important. It gives an independent measure of your monthly unique visitors. Ranking 1 has the most traffic and so on. For example on the basis of most visited site in the world, Yahoo is currently ranked one by Alexa.
   
   This information helps you determine how well your advertising campaigns are going, how your rivals are doing and how to keep your website one step ahead of them.
   
   The Alexa information is also used by other search engines so you benefit from an increase in you search engine results page (SERPS) rankings as your site progresses up the rankings.



2. Related Links: Another vital feature of Alexa toolbar is it provides links to additional websites that are similar to the one that is being viewed.
   
   When you start searching the term on your favorite search engine, it gives a list of urls’ closely matching your search term in the search engine result page. This feature allows you to view a list of similar website without much of an effort – great for competition analysis. Also, you will be able to see a new set of related links on the toolbar that may be same or different from the earlier ones, which allows you to save time you would have otherwise spent for searching.

There are additional features that come with Alexa toolbar like a popup blocker, search engine entry box, a link to Amazon & Alexa website, and additional information about the current Alexa ranking of the website that you are visiting.

In conclusion, the Alexa toolbar is a valuable tool for determining a website's placement or position in the Internet world. It is interesting to note that Google also uses Alexa's information for ranking and indexing websites. Whether you just want to use the Alexa Toolbar's features for general web browsing or for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) analysis, I recommend going to http://www.alexa.com and installing the Alexa Toolbar in your favorite web browser.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company
http://www.itegritygroup.com

How to add a Google Toolbar to Your Browser and Why You Want to do it

In the simple terms, a toolbar is any row, column, block, etc. of buttons or icons that activate a given program function when clicked. They are designed to offer shortcuts to commonly used functions.

Google Toolbar for Internet is a feature from Google Inc. and it can be installed on almost any browser including Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox. To install Google toolbar on your browser, you must make sure you have the right operating system. I can be installed by clicking on to: http://toolbar.google.com/
It’s a worldwide accepted fact that Google is the most popular search engine amongst thousands of World Wide search engines. But if you have to pull up its home page every time you run a search, you’re wasting time.

The best way is to use Google from a toolbar and your search operation starts without even opening your browser. Google Toolbar have a shortcut to Google Bookmark page and Page Rank indicator, also you can login fast to your blog or Gmail account.
Google Toolbar was designed as a tool to make the Internet surfing easier and help people find the information they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.
Google toolbar offers major benefits and other miscellaneous useful features, which are listed below:

1. Google Search Window: Take Google’s search window with you anywhere you go on the Internet. This built-in search window makes it incredibly easy to make a quick and efficient search regarding anything you happen to be reading. It helps people find the information they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.
2. Pop-Up Blocker: Pop- up ads – the little advertisement windows that sprout like mushrooms in a damp basement which are real impediment to productivity. Therefore, it’s better to use a pop-up blocker, which prevents these annoyances from opening as you surf the web. The Google toolbar has a built–in pop-up blocker that provides relief from this perpetual pest.
3. Auto Fill: The Google toolbar’s auto fill function can save you scads of time filling out order forms and other pages on the Web. The feature lets you store your name, address, and other information in one place of your computer. This allows you to automatically have any form filled in based on your saved personal information and drastically speed up the process of filling out forms and applications online.
4. Additional Features: Google is continuously making updates and upgrades to the functions represented on the Google toolbar. Now they have options for spell check, a word translator and an autolink feature that instantly provides a map of a given location, bookmarks, a VIN number that gives a vehicle’s history, ISBN numbers to book history, etc.

Google is also offering a new version of the Toolbar for enterprise environments. With this new version, an enterprise could distribute customized toolbars to their users pre-loaded with Custom Buttons for Intranet sites, employee directories, and frequently used information sources.

These are just a few of the useful features provided by Google toolbar. It should be clear that Google Toolbar is a must for anyone who uses an Internet browser on a regular basis for faster and more efficient Internet surfing experience.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company

http://www.itegritygroup.com

What is ASP.NET? -Top 12 Advantages of ASP.NET

What is ASP.NET? ASP.NET stands for Active Server Pages.NET. In other words ASP.NET is a web application which is developed and marketed by the Microsoft.
ASP.NET is used to create Web pages and services and is an integral part of Microsoft's .NET vision. It is a magic tool for the programmers, it allows them to build web sites, web applications, and web servers.

ASP.NET is a part of the .NET framework, which allows developers to build dynamic web applications and web services using compiled languages like VB and C#.
ASP.NET is not limited to script languages, it allows you to make use of NET languages like C#, J#, VB, etc. It allows the developers to develop very compelling applications by making use of visual studio, the development tool from Microsoft. It is built on a common language runtime that can be used on a server to build powerful Web applications. ASP.NET is purely server-side technology.

In the early days of the Web i.e. before the release of Internet Information Services (IIS) in 1997, the contents of web pages were largely static. These web pages needed to be constantly, and manually, modified. There was an urgent need to create websites that were dynamic and would update automatically.

Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) was brought to the market to meet this need. ASP executed on the server side, with its output sent to the user's web browser, thus allowing the server to generate dynamic web pages based on the actions of the user.
These server-side technologies are important contributions to the development of the Web. Amazon.com, eBay.com, and so on, are the results of ASP.NET without ASP.NET it would not be possible.

ASP.NET offers several important advantages over previous Web development models.
Here’s a list 12:

1. ASP.NET drastically reduces the amount of code required to build large applications.
2. With built in Windows authentication and per-application configuration, your applications are safe and secured.
3. It provides better performance by taking advantage of early binding, just-in-time compilation, native optimization, and caching services right out of the box.
4. The ASP.NET framework is complemented by a rich toolbox and designer in the Visual Studio integrated development environment. WYSIWYG editing, drag-and-drop server controls, and automatic deployment are just a few of the features this powerful tool provides.
5. Provides simplicity as ASP.NET makes it easy to perform common tasks, from simple form submission and client authentication to deployment and site configuration.
6. The source code and HTML are together therefore ASP.NET pages are easy to maintain and write. Also the source code is executed on the server. This provides a lot of power and flexibility to the web pages.
7. All the processes are closely monitored and managed by the ASP.NET runtime, so that if process is dead, a new process can be created in its place, which helps keep your application constantly available to handle requests.
8. It is purely server-side technology so. ASP.NET code executes on the server before it is sent to the browser.
9. Being language-independent, it allows you to choose the language that best applies to your application or partition your application across many languages.
10. ASP.NET makes for easy deployment. There is no need to register components because the configuration information is built-in.
11. The Web server continuously monitors the pages, components and applications running on it. If it notices any memory leaks, infinite loops, other illegal activities, it immediately destroys those activities and restarts itself.
12. Easily works with ADO .NET using data-binding and page formatting features. It is an application which runs faster and counters large volumes of users without having performance problems.

In short ASP.NET, the next version of ASP, is a programming framework used to create enterprise-class Web Applications. These applications are accessible on a global basis leading to efficient information management.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company

http://www.itegritygroup.com