The Christian liturgical calendar has special times like Christmas and Easter, but it also has what’s known as “ordinary time,” when nothing special is happening. This seems like a useful concept for websites, too. There are special times like redesigns, seasonal peaks and valleys, linkbuilding campaigns and press pushes, but there are also ordinary times.
We’re currently doing redesigns and linkbuilding campaigns and other special stuff for a lot of sites, but our lab site is just going along in a normal way. As you can see, we’re just about back up to the peak we reached during Back to School (though not with as steep a slope), so we’re happy with the increasing traffic. We’re cleaning up some duplicate content issues, and we’re working to catch the next wave in our target industry, but otherwise we’re just doing normal upkeep.
Exactly what is normal upkeep?
- Fresh content every day. If you can’t do every day, aim for several times a week.If you just figure you’ll post whenever you have something to say, you’ll look one day and find that it’s been months since you last blogged or added a photo or whatever you do to keep new content coming. Make yourself a schedule and stick to it.
- Keep up with your analytics. Watch or have someone watch for you. When you have a spike in traffic, or results from a source you hadn’t considered, or the effectiveness of some of your strategies begins to wane, you need to know so you can respond appropriately.You also want to make sure that you don’t have lagging traffic or any other problems. It’s one thing to keep things perking along and another to ignore your website.
- Don’t slack off on your social media. If you only talk to people when you have a marketing push on, you’re going to look insincere. If there’s nothing major going on with you, then you have a perfect opportunity to talk with your friends, contacts, and followers about what’s going on with them.
If you do these things, you can feel confident about your website in between major undertakings.
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