Website owner is always on the lookout for ways to improve the performance their website and one of the absolute best ways to continuously improve the performance of your website is to use split testing, also called A/B split testing. A/B testing is a simple, scientific way to isolate and test variables in a real-world environment.

When you have just one ad out on the web, it’s difficult to tell what is working and what is not working. That’s where split-testing comes in. Split-testing simply means creating a very similar, but very slightly different ad. For example, if your original ad mentions free shipping at the end of your last line, you might create a mirror ad (as your split test ad) that mentions the free shipping at the beginning of the last line of the ad.

One example of split test is one which Amazon.com conducted few years ago. Below is the "ready to buy" area on its pages.

The original site always used version A. The book section of the site removed that phrase from the buttons (version B) but for a long time you could still find versions of button A on other areas of Amazon’s site

Another example might be to write an ad without referencing the price of your product. Your second ad could include the price. From there you could track which ad receives a better response.
For more examples of A/B tests on public sites with statistical results , you can click on the link below :

http://www.abtests.com/

Run your ads for about 30 clicks each. That gives you enough of a sample to be able to tell what’s working and what isn’t. Drop the ad that’s performing worse. While you keep running the better performing ad, create a new ad that builds on what you’ve just learned from your split test.

Repeat the entire process. In the long run, you will be continually improving your ads. This will lead to more clicks and more sales. Just keep a track of everything that you do.

Any web maintenance service is worth every penny if you keep your visitors coming back and they become your leads and eventually buy your service or product. The longer they stay on your site, the more likely you will get a sale with a favorable conversion rate of 1 sale per 4 unique visitors. So as a part of maintenance work, you must check your website frequently to find any link glitches, headlines needing keyword optimization, sales letter that don’t hook and sell your audience. You have to continuosly keep a close eye on your website and and work on improving it on a regular basis.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process to improve the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engine using natural or un-paid search results as compared to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO targets different kinds of search like image search, video search and many more. This gives any web site its web presence.

Just making a great and attractive site does not serve the purpose. The website has to maintain periodically for it to make its presence on the web.

SEO revolves around two major processes, the on-site optimization and the off-site optimization. On-site optimization includes anything that you control on your site like the title tags, content, linking structure within your site and all other factors on your pages. Off-site optimization is everything else. This means all the links to your site from other sites on the Internet. In theory, you can’t control off-site factors. So between on-site and off-site optimization your site’s rankings are determined.

Optimization techniques are highly dependent on the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines’ market shares vary from market to market, as so does the competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches. In markets outside the United States, Google’s share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007. As of 2006, Google had an 85-90% market share in Germany. While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany. As of June 2008, the market share of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise. That market share is achieved in a number of countries

There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better recognition in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one big magic thing you can do to get a top placement at a search engine for your website, but you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select.

For each page you should come up with a list of no more than two key word phrases, each less than three or four words long. Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word "Software" for example, is ignored by many search engines – it is what they call a "stop" word, like "the" or "a" – they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotation marks or otherwise make it clear it is part of your search.

Website maintenance plays an important role in targeting enough traffic on your website and to make it profitable.
               Updating the current content including company’s information, personal information and any other textual content of the website comes under website maintenance. It may include inserting new graphics depending on the industry the company operates. In order to make your website more popular from the competitors is how often you update your content. If search engine’s spider crawl your website every month and find nothing has changed, they are less likely to come back and index your website for search. Updating content on regular basis can remedy this situation and invite the search engine spiders to re-index your site more frequently.
                The images on a website occupy most of the spaces. So it is utmost important to optimize these images so that they load faster on a customer’s browser page. It is a major part in web maintenance as it directly affects the loading speed and performance of your website.
                 Link validation is also a part of all web maintenance services. It includes microscopic scanning of all pages to ensure that there are no dead links.

Electronic commerce, commonly known as (electronic marketing) e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet. E-commerce has completely revolutionized the system of communication and has transformed the way consumers purchase goods and services. It helps to sell products and services economically. Some common applications related to e-commerce are email, instant messaging, online shopping and order tracking, online banking and the list goes on. Ecommerce allows consumers to electronically exchange goods and services with no barriers of time or distance.

Continuous improvement and time to time changes are required to keep the site updated. Using a ecommerce website is like going to a store, look for items to be purchased, once you find those items you keep them in the shopping cart and then you go to the cashier to make the payment and then you exit the store. The same can be said for the eCommerce sites, it is a store through a website.

The maintenance of a eCommerce sites has to done extensively. You have to constantly review how well the site is operating and consider new opportunities and ways of working it out.

The maintenance for e-commerce websites involves real time tracking of transactions, e-tailing of products using a robust and scalable backend module, secure electronic transactions and the remote management of logistics including the tracking of users, process and information.

To promote a positive image for the business and attract more visitors to the site, the content of the site should be accurate and should be updated on a regular basis. This will show the professionalism of the company.

Customer are interested in statistics, detailed descriptions and will like to gather as much of information as possible. So try giving as much details as possible on your website.

Making the websites secure so that the customers can perform any transaction without fear is one most important feature of website.

The websites have to be maintained regularly in order to keep it up-to-date. A website is successful if it gives a reason or reasons for a viewer to revisit the site. The viewer may be attracted to a website if it has new contents, new information, different developments or an interactive element. Website maintenance includes text updates, graphic changes within its program.

The content of the webpage which includes a headline, descriptive text, photo, audio clip or a video clip, also needs to be maintained and content management is a part of website maintenance. Updating the current content also includes company’s information or personal information on the website. It may include inserting new graphics depending on the industry the company operates. One of the things that can help you distinguish your website from the competitors is how often you update your content. If nothing changes in the website, then the search engine will stop indexing your website for search as it finds out that no changes have been done to the website for quite some time. Updating content on regular basis can invite the search engine to re-index your site more frequently. Content management is important to improve business relationships and increase revenues

Effective maintenance strategy is by deciding how often you need or want to update your site and how extensive those updates will be. For example, a news publisher will have to update information on a daily basis, in some cases, even on hourly basis. A retailer may update its site whenever there is new merchandise and for special sales or promotions.

Attractive, descriptive, uncluttered and websites which always has something new or different on its page will catch a customer’s eye and hence will increase your business and this is what you want your website to do.

Website maintenance can be done by yourself if the site is small and requires less updates but if your business is growing, you might think of handing over the maintenance of your website to the website maintenance company. This way you can save your valuable time and focus on expanding your business and let the maintenance company do the updating and maintaining of the site. But you have to be in constant touch with the maintenance company with your requirements about how want things to look , what you don’t want  and constantly giving feedbacks about their work and showing interest in your own website.

Many clients want to maintain and manage their website by themselves. Content Management System or CMS is the answer for that. CMS is a software that keeps track of every piece of content on your website much like a library. As the name suggests, it is a back end tool that allows you to update text, pictures, and links without any knowledge of HTML. Some CMSs even allows you to add video, audio and other buttons. Therefore, CMS is necessary for a highly featured website development so that you can drive high traffic.

The use of CMS is recommended if you frequently update your site with news, product information, pricing or other information. Using a CMS allows updating and publishing your contents fast and helps you in saving some cents. You can update features such as new products/services, update product description and add news about your company and so on.

Content can be in the form of texts, pictures, music and documents. If you want to make your website reliable, flexible and user friendly, the CMS can come in handy for you. Whether you want to add new content, upgrade or delete the present content or adjustment of website templates, CMS allows web masters to take care of all the aspects concerning their website. A true CMS will allow you to have full control over your website helping you manage the content in whichever way you want.

There are a large number of CMS software available in the market. Few popular ones are Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and many more. If your business model is on quality website for low prices, then the most cost-efficient publishing CMS tool is Wordpress. Wordpress is free to use for any website you want, without paying license fees. Drupal is also a free software package that allows an individual to publish, manage and organize a wide variety of contents on the website. Joomla is another CMS, which enables you to build websites and powerful online applications. Best thing is Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone and is used all over the world to power websites of all shapes and sizes.

So in the end you have to decide which is best for your business – to maintain your website by yourself or to give it to the website maintenance company.