After recently inviting a friend to join Twitter, she replied with an invitation to visit and join her website as a member. I did so, but upon navigating about the site, noticed some things to fix, and upon viewing the source code, realized that there was more wrong than meets the eye.

During this website review, the first thing I noticed was a title description with “.net” in it. Also a metadescription of over 400 characters displayed as three sentences. I continued viewing the code and realized there were more errors the more I looked. I then decided to run her website through Website Grader to see what it would come up with, and found that she scored a 15/100, after being online for a couple years. “Why?” I asked myself, and realized she had let it sit there without adding any content to it since the day it launched.

One thing many small business website owners do not practice, is adding content as often as possible, to give search engines what I like to call “Google Fuel”. They launch a website and think they can kick back and watch money roll in, but that’s not how it works. Regardless of what other web designers say, having a quality website that attracts traffic and repeat visitors to convert to paying customers takes hard work. Adding content often may seem like a chore, but it helps in making a static site more well known with search engines and visitors alike.

This recent website review gave me insight of small business website owners’ tendancy to leave a site sitting idle expecting traffic to come to them. Adding content can be vital for the life of a website, and should be updated regularly.