We all know it’s one thing to setup your website but its a whole other thing to continue managing your directory website.
Management can include many different categories such as keeping listings up to date, monetization, security, SEO, and bringing in more traffic. Here are the categories of managing your directory website that we are going to go through today.
Maintenance of Your Directory Website
Maintaining Submissions
This includes deleting old submissions and posts, or ones that don’t work. Maintaining submissions is important for keeping spam or low rated sites away from your directory or listing website. Low rated sites that are linked to your directory will allow Google to penalize your website. In the end this will effect your search engine optimization.
Search Engine Optimization
Speaking of search engine optimization, as you have probably heard before it is important. Showing up on search engines can allow more traffic and in turn is the key to money for your directory. WordPress already has integrated features to help but there are more you can do to help with that. Here is a complete list of plugins that can optimize your search engine ranking.
Custom URL’s and Permalinks
These are the website addresses that is located in the navigation bar. There are several types of settings for permalinks including city base, author base, listings category, and listing base. Make sure with your website you are able to customize your URL’s because some are not optimized.
Allow Ownership Claims
If a user (or you) post a listing, the actual listing owners can claim ownership of it. This is similar to online review websites where people will write a review about a company and explain different information, then the actual owner can find and claim it. This allows for complete maintenance control of those claims.
You can also have users pay for the claim which can generate a way to bring in money.
Create Listings
You can individually submit your own listings by using the back-end. This is great to get a head start on listings, and the owners can claim those listings later on. You can add your own images, and map location. Creating listings provides more efficiency for your website and ensure the listings are fulfilling your requirements.
Allow Reviews and Ratings
For your directory website, you need manage the review and ratings on posts. These are documented ways that impact people’s decisions. They can be beneficial or completely detrimental. It is important to go through and maintain reviews because some can leave an incorrect reputation. Ratings are also important because a lot of people wont even look at a product or service if it is not at least average rating.
Security
It is also important to protect your website from slowing down and malware. There are ways to automatically scan your website, detect and delete those threats, so your website can always run smoothly. Other plugins can allow for registration authentication logins, and access to backing up for migration purposes.
Some features are built-in but for more security there are a surplus of plugins. Using Plugins for like Malware, Sucuri, Google Authenticator and BlogVault.
Here’s everything you need to know about security for your directory website.