Weekly Website Wednesday – Week #3
Keep Updating
Welcome to my Week #3 Weekly Website Wednesday post, where I try to share tips and tricks for maintaining your own kennel related website. This week I want to talk about how often you should be updating your website. Your website is sort of like a digital business card, but unlike the static, unchanging paper business cards you carry around in your wallet, your website is designed to be changed, updated and refreshed.
I’m not going to say that you need to update your website every day, but you do need to update it as much as possible. Realistically, it might be pretty hard to find content to add to your kennel site every day, but a bi-weekly, weekly or even a monthly schedule is certainly possible. Try to dedicate some time each week just to add something new to the site. You don’t have to write some big to-do like this Weekly Website Wednesday post; it can be as simple as adding a photo gallery from a training session or a recent hunt. Try adding some reference dogs to your website, these are famous dogs that might show up in your pedigrees or that you’ve breed to. Remove old dogs and add some new ones, share references and testimonials. Here’s a shocker … anything you’d post on Social Media account (that’s related to your kennel) … can also be posted to your website. Social media is good for engaging with current customers, but the website will probably be better at finding new ones and everything you can add to your website is another avenue for people to find you. This is why they say Content is King.
Why do you want to keep updating your website? For one, it makes the site appear active and alive, like somebody actually maintains it. The other reason is to get the search engines to index your site more often. You may have heard of spiders or bots, these are basically small programs that scour the internet for content to list in the search engines. If a bot crawls your website and doesn’t see any new content, it’ll eventually stop visiting your site as often. Why waste the resources indexing a site that never changes when there’s literally over a billion other sites out there that also need to be indexed. Changing your content and posting updates trains the bot to keep coming back.
How does that help you? A well-maintained website will rank better than a dead one, it’s a simple as that. Plus, it will help you if you ever want to optimize your site rankings. Search Engines Optimization is the process of making changes to your website, waiting on a bot to index your changes, seeing where those changes get reflected in the search results, then based on the outcome ... make additional changes. This process repeats until you get your desired results. Having the bots crawl your website every two days instead of every 8 weeks, allows you to see the results of your changes much faster.
It can be a lot of work if you want to have a high-ranking kennel website. To quote Thomas Edison - “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work”. Let other people’s miss opportunity, be your gain, keep updating.
