Competition - Web sites are always competing for traffic, links and search engine placement among a continuously growing population
of other Web sites. Each site is growing and more sites are coming into being every day, and accumulating links each
day. The Web is expanding. This will not change in the foreseeable future. The
Google PageRank and other metrics that
determine the visibility of your site are all relative rankings with respect to other sites.
The result is that you need to keep running just to stay in the same place. Initially, your Web site expanded
(probably fairly rapidly) from nothing and accumulated Links. As
that happened, its standing rose relative to other Web sites. Eventually, it probably reached some equilibrium point, To
maintain that equilibrium position, you need to keep adding pages and getting others to link to those pages.
Remember also that the number of Web users increases significantly each year. If your site has the same number of
visitors this year as it did last year, it has lost audience share.
Aging - Web materials "age" for several reasons. The first is that the information in them ages. You may have
the top Web site for Paris Hilton photos, but trust me, in ten or twenty years nobody is going to care much to see Paris
Hilton photos. Political and technical information can get old even faster than sexy celebrities. A second reason is
that links age and disappear. When a Web page or Web site goes offline, your links to that page become invalid, and you
also lose any links that were given to you. Left alone, a Web site loses backlinks over time, and it also accumulates
dead links that it originates, which can result in lowered authority.
Required Web site Maintenance
Deleting Bad Links - Periodically, you need to comb through your Web site with a link checking tool and
eliminate as many dead links as possible, and fix links that are broken due to errors. This is tedious work, but
necessary. If you know that a web site has gone off line, and you have many links to that site, you will have to find
and eliminate all of them, or change them to an error page at your own Web site. You are always going to have some
bad links, but you should not get to the situation where you have mostly or all bad links!
Adding New Links - New links will accumulate naturally if you are adding new material that others link to.
Alongside your Web site, you should also have auxiliary sites or Web logs that are external to it and link to it. Adding
pages to those sites will add links to your Web site as well. However, it is likely that having many links from the same
site is not as good as having the same number of links from multiple sources.
Adding new pages - Of course, you need to have fresh content at your site. Two ways to ensure fresh content at
your site fairly easily are forums where content is generated by users and Web logs (which also attract comments). Every
new page that is created must link back to the main page and other major portal pages.
Be careful about changing main pages too often. New content- in the form of additional pages is often reflected in
the main page or a portal page, but radical changes in any page that has been optimized may cause it to lose its search
engine positioning for a
Keyword. For example, if you are the widgets company,
you may have battled your way to the number 1 or number 2 spot for keyword widgets in the Google search engine
listings for your main page. Make as few changes as possible in that page as long as your listing is at the top, because
you have no place to go but down!
