Website Monitoring And Maintenance

You cannot build a website or have it built and then simply forget it. You will need to monitor it's performance and to carry out periodic maintenance.

Among other things it is very important to :

Monitor Your Search Engine Rankings
Understand How your visitors interact with your website
Locate any broken links
Identify and fix problem Pages e.g. no title or description
Verify that site forms work
Update pages
Add New Pages
Add/Remove links
Perform Backups
etc

The level of effort required depends on the site complexity and the number of pages but for typical small business sites <25 that have only occasional updates then an hour or 2 every month/2 months is all that is normally required once the site is reasonably established (1 year old).

You do not need to buy expensive software or tools to do the job as Google supplies all you need for free with the Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics.

Your first job is to register your site to use Google Webmaster tools and for Google Analytics. To do that you will need a Google account which is free and is linked to your email address.

I would recommend using an email address that you don't publicly use (if you have one as it is more secure.

You can also use a Google Gmail account and again I would create an account that I would only use with webmaster tools and analytics, Adwords or Adsense.

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