While building a website is might be easy, managing it to ensure it ranks well with search engines is likely to be a lot harder. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, effective web management involves content development and continuous site design. With that in mind, here are five tips that you can use to manage your website effectively, and possibly ensure that it ranks above most of your competitors’ websites.

Content

Obviously, you have to give people a good reason to visit your website. One of the top things that most people search for on the Internet is great content. At the same time, you have to make it easy for visitors to access the content on your website. If you have a lot of content, it is not wise to add all of it at once to your site. Instead, add the information slowly over time so that you can encourage your visitors to return to the site for more content.

Content Management System

If your website has more than four web pages, you should use a content management system to help you edit and add pages quickly. Such a system would also make changing the overall site theme a breeze. To get the most out of such a system, avoid the temptation to present your ideas in a haphazard manner and instead paste your content into the content management system. Remember most web users have short attention spans and ideas presented in a logical manner will likely result in increased traffic.

Continuous Site Development

You cannot afford to rest on your laurels after putting up your website. Technology changes at warp speed and you must keep abreast of developments related to site design and search engine optimization (SEO). Make it your duty to read feedback from readers to find out if they are unhappy with the site design or content. The majority of spammers tend to post malicious links where other readers can see them. You should delete these links immediately to ensure search engine crawlers do not view your site as a source of spam.

Social Media Integration

Social media sites have become powerful tools that project managers can no longer afford to ignore. A study carried out by ComScore and published by the Wall Street Journal found that social networking sites account for 1.2 billion web users. At the same time, the sites represent 19 percent of the time spent online. These statistics show that a web strategy that does not include social media integration is doomed to fail.

Communicate with consumers on weekends or days of the week when engagement metrics often tend to be high. For example, research carried out by KISSmetrics found that the best time to post social media content is 1pm on Facebook and 5pm on Twitter. Make sure you integrate buttons for major social media sites such as Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook.

Optimize Webpage Speed

Web users are unlikely to put up with webpages that take long to download. Start by optimizing graphics on your site such as JPEGs, images, videos, and GIFs. This can increase the download speed for your site significantly. Keep in mind visitors to your site use different browsers. Test the changes that you make on the most popular browsers such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Do not make any changes without creating a backup of your current webpage. This is to ensure that you can easily restore your site if the update process results in errors.

If you have a website for your business, it is important to keep visitors happy. To achieve this goal, you need to have a content management system in place, continuous site development, social media buttons, and webpages that load quickly. Check the links on your site to make sure they work properly. Visitors who continually see error messages are unlikely to stick around for long. Finally, check for errors related to your HTML/CSS code to ensure you do not problems related to Meta tags and headers later.

Author Bio: William Stevens is a writer who creates informative articles in relation to technology. In this article, he offers a few tips to managing a website and aims to encourage further study with a masters management information systems.