Once your website is complete, it’s time to get the word out. There are a number of approaches that can be taken to accomplish this task. The most important of them is getting the major search engines to list your website in their search results. While it does take up to 3-6 months to get fully listed in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and, MSN Live), all of the hard work of determining appropriate keywords will pay off. This is also important to remember when you add content to your site, and pursue other efforts to help improve your rankings is that the search engines take a while to catch up and reflect your changes. Thus, expecting overnight success and results is unrealistic.

That doesn’t mean you should sit back and relax while the search engines list your site. While you should definitely celebrate the major milestone of finally getting that website available for the general public, this is actually a very important time in your website’s life that many new website owners let slip through their fingers.

You have the opportunity to get feedback from visitors before you are generally available from search engines which unless you are doing pay per click advertising will be the vast majority of your overall traffic. Thus, you can start learning and evaluating your website based on your actual visitor behavior starting NOW instead of waiting 3-6 months later for search engine traffic. Depending on the approach taken, you may even improve your initial rankings in the search engines based on how you are drawing traffic to your website and speed up the process of getting listed in the major search engines.

So how much effort is required to maintain a website?

What I would recommend is that you review your website every 3 months. At that time, you should review your content and images and consider whether you want to make any changes. At the same time, you should work with your design company to review your search engine rankings and traffic to determine if any changes need to be made to your marketing strategy.

Outside of those efforts, the only time your website should take is just to answer emails that you receive from your site, or if applicable fulfilling online orders.

We hope you found this guide beneficial. If you have any additional questions, contact us and we will be happy to answer them.