When you’re trying to manage a website, it’s important that you focus on every facet of the site if you want to provide visitors with the kind of experience they’re looking for. In 2020, managing a website effectively requires even more care and attention now that everyone is working from home and generally has more time to browse the internet. If you want your website to be successful, it’s important that you increase visibility to the site. Even if the content and layout of your website is spectacular, you’ll likely find it difficult to bring in new customers if your website isn’t visible in the first place.

Your first goal when learning how to manage your website effectively should be to establish and maintain a brand, which is essential once it comes time to start marketing your products or services. By creating strong and consistent branding, you’ll have a much easier time at bringing in site visitors and increasing customer loyalty.

Make sure that you start small and grow your website management skills. Whether you begin by learning search engine optimization for focus first on social media marketing, the skills you learn now can pay dividends for your website and brand in the future.

This article provides a thorough guide on what it takes to manage a website effectively on the modern internet.

Keep Up With SEO Techniques

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Search engine optimization involves taking steps to make sure that your website is more visible on search engines like Google and Bing. When it comes to Google, they use a ranking algorithm to determine whether a website has been optimized. This kind of optimization can include everything from using the right keywords in your written content to increasing the speed and performance of your website.

A key element of search engine optimization is page ranking, which is designed to measure the overall importance of website pages. With the PageRank tool by Google, websites that have been outfitted with responsive functionality will rank higher than pages that have yet to be optimized for mobile devices. Responsive technology means that every device can access your website without issue. If you don’t implement this technology, mobile users would be presented with a zoomed-in screen that requires extensive scrolling. The majority of mobile users will avoid websites that aren’t responsive.

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Along with downloading and installing the right performance plugins for your WordPress website, it’s also highly recommended that you use Google AMP to increase the speed and performance of your site. This tool essentially compresses and optimizes key CSS, HTML, and JavaScript elements that are on your website, which should keep your site from being bogged down by multimedia or other intensive components. Integrating the right keywords into the written content on your website will also help you appear towards the top of certain search results. If you use the right keywords, you should be able to increase site visibility and bolster traffic to your website.

There are also numerous quick tips that you can use to enhance your SEO efforts. For instance, make sure that you use specific and accurate titles for each page on your website, which automatically looks better to the Google SEO algorithm. The same is true of descriptive metadata that states what your article is about without requiring the reader to fully enter your website. Including this metadata sends the appropriate signals to the ranking algorithm for Google, which should improve your on-page SEO.

Keywords are words or phrases that can be placed in your site content in a manner that allows your website to be found on search engines. If you place keywords in your blog articles that are relevant to your website and are known to increase traffic, Google will rank your site pages higher on search results. Keep in mind that the majority of internet users only select one of the first three results that they receive from a search query, which is why a high ranking is essential for increased visibility. When you’re attempting to improve your SEO efforts, make sure that you regularly add new content and update your existing content. Blog articles are another effective way to improve traffic to a site. In fact, this article is doing the same thing.

Work on Your Social Media Presence

Another key element of managing your website in 2020 should be to work on your social media presence. Facebook alone has more than 2.6 billion users per month, which is why it’s highly recommended that you focus on driving traffic to your website via social media advertising.

Three of the top social media platforms for advertising include Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, all of which have their own advertising programs that websites can make use of. Make sure that your marketing on these platforms is specific to your user demographic. In the event that your core demographic includes people between the ages of 18-24, your best option for marketing may be Instagram, which has more than one billion users and is comprised of a user base that’s primarily below the age of 30.

Things to Check on a Weekly Basis

While search engine optimization and social media advertising are two website management techniques that every site owner should implement, there are also a range of additional steps that should be taken on a weakly basis. For instance, it’s essential that you remain up-to-date on the security of your website, which is paramount if you want to make sure that hackers don’t steal user information and data. There are numerous security vulnerabilities that could be affecting your website, all of which should be dealt with to effectively minimize the risk of someone getting unauthorized access to your site. You can also protect your user’s data with a security plugin for WordPress.

Before you start integrating security plugins into your website, make sure that you fully understand the types of vulnerabilities that you need to protect your website from. Everything from malware to SSL certificate vulnerabilities could pose potential problems for your website. Check for WordPress, plugin, and theme updates on a weekly basis as well, which ensures that these elements of your website are always up-to-date. This step helps with security. Older versions of themes or plugins will invariably be more susceptible to cyber threats.

You should also think about testing your website using different types of browsers and devices to make sure that everything is working as intended. While there are many different tools that you can use to test your website, among the best options available to you is mobiReady, which is designed specifically to test website performance and provide site owners with analytics reports that they can use to improve the performance and overall security of their website.

Stay Up to Date with Digital Trends

To bolster the chances that your website is successful, it’s recommended that you do what you can to remain aware of the latest digital trends. For 2020, these trends center somewhat around AI technology, which has continued to improve and provides companies with the ability to gain better data insights and implement machine learning to more effectively understand customer behaviors. With these tools in place, site owners can easily and precisely personalize the marketing materials that they send to these customers. If you want your website to be as successful as it can be, it’s important that you take advantage of the latest trends in the digital space.

Along with the website design trends that you should be paying attention to, it’s also essential that you focus on technological advancements to improve your website for current and prospective customers. For emails, personalization is important and can help significantly with increasing customer loyalty. You should also think about using omni-channel marketing to properly reach your customers. This type of marketing involves using several different platforms to provide your audience with a multi-channel experience, which extends to everything from social media advertising and app marketing to blog content.

When you’re first designing your website, try to provide site visitors with an ample amount of interactive content, which should keep your site visitors engaged long enough to sign up for a newsletter or make a purchase. Video marketing is also integral to the success of any website. When properly implemented, this form of marketing can provide fantastic ROI, build trust, boost conversions, and appeal to tablet and mobile users. No one wants to read things anymore, which is why brevity is key and videos/interactive elements are essential.

Consider Hiring Experts to Help You

As this article has shown, effectively managing a website takes a lot of work. Along with implementing regular SEO and creating social media marketing campaigns, managing a website also means paying attention to the latest digital trends and constantly updating your site security. As such, you should consider hiring experts to assist you with managing your website. Once your website starts to gain traction, you might want to bring in some management help to make sure that you keep track of the necessary changes and are able to continue growing.

There are numerous benefits that come with hiring outside help, the primary of which is that doing so will allow you to focus on the business side of things. The management team that you hire will be experienced in handling all facets of website management, which means that they likely won’t make as many mistakes as you otherwise would have if attempting to complete all of these tasks on your own. Hiring outside help will also allow you to focus on refining your brand, which is integral to long-term success.

Web management companies have the knowledge and expertise necessary to do all of the things mentioned in this article in an efficient and professional manner. Another reason to hire outside help is if you have already started to manage your website and have been struggling with the tasks required of you. In this event, you might want to contact a web growth company. The most important thing is to begin managing your website today so that you can benefit from making these changes and improvements to your website.

Bryan Miller of Bryt Designs Long Beach Web Design, Development, & SEO
Author
Bryan Miller

Bryan Miller is an entrepreneur and web tech enthusiast specializing in web design, development and digital marketing. Bryan is a recent graduate of the MBA program at the University of California, Irvine and continues to pursue tools and technologies to find success for clients across a varieties of industries.