Managing Your Web Business Health

Managing your web business health is vital for all site owners. Let’s resolve to get healthier in 2012.

As the owner of a website, you have the responsibility for ensuring that the health of your website is the best it can be. There is a good business advantage to this, and there is an added business bonus that I will cover later.

Is Your Web Business Fit For Purpose?

I have written at length about the importance of producing your website in accordance with a good websites business template founded on a clear Internet business purpose. You need that to develop a healthy web business, but you also need to check that it is being produced in a fit and proper way.

I use an add-in for the Firefox browser called SEO Doctor. It takes seconds to install, and gives you vital health information about every web page you visit, including your own, and your competitors.

How you handle your own website depends how involved you are in the technical aspects. If you are a small business owner who does everything, then read my technical website health article, and watch for more articles about the specific points covered by the SEO Doctor tool. If you have employees or suppliers who handle this, then send them to that article.

Whether you do it yourself, or employ others, you need to set standards for the health of your website. Must every page be 100%, or is that too expensive to achieve for small benefits in search engine traffic? Will you apply different standards to more important pages? Will you assign someone to monitor daily, weekly or monthly? Note that there is no site-wide reporting in this tool, so you might need to research other monitoring services or software.

How Strong Is Your Competition?

SEO Doctor can help you analyze your competitors strengths and weaknesses in two important phases of your web business cycle.

During planning stages, look for high-ranking websites with a low health index. The numbers are only an indication, but could reveal some easy targets. Health index numbers should not sway you in your opinions about the overall quality of your competition, but they are one more factor to consider as you decide if, or where, you can be better than the rest.

During the monitoring stages, as well as looking at your own performance, consider the health of your competition. Are they also improving their website health in a bid to attract a better share of search traffic? Do not be complacent if you are stronger than your competitors – you are now their target. Keep improving your website health, never forgetting that this is no measure of your real strength.

Real strength, and true web business health, comes from content that is better than all others. It must be readable, attractively presented, easy to navigate, and cleverly marketed. Just ensure that website page health problems do not detract from your overall web business health.

If you need more help on this, please use the web business health forum.