Out of Site Out of Mind: What Does Your Webmaster Really Do?

For a lot of folks when they think of their webmaster the image they conjure up is some guy in a dark room with the glow of a screen making him look more like the Dungeon Master than a serious professional. In fact, you might even think that he or she must play Dungeons and Dragons as a prerequisite to being a webmaster. While some of us do play D&D for fun, you should know that for most of us the fate of your website is not contingent upon how the 20 sided dice lands.

The fact is that though your webmaster is often out of sight and out of mind, he or she is playing an integral part in your business success.

So what exactly does your Webmaster do? Well for a lot of us, we are hard at work writing timely and relevant content for your website. Yes, that is right. The content has to come from somewhere and so we wear a marketing hat and in many cases we are often the first person your client sees (albeit behind the curtain like the Wonderful Wizard of Oz). The reality is that your website is your #1 sales person. It is generally the first thing your client sees when looking for your products or services and that is why the content on your website is so very important. The next time you ask yourself, what does my webmaster really do, just remember that your webmaster is busy making you look good!

Tune Out Here

While content development is one of the many facets that comprise the role of your webmaster in supporting your online marketing and creating a quality digital footprint for you online, they are also hard at work doing all that technical (geeky) stuff for you in the back ground. Some of the work that your webmaster does falls under the purview of what we call technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and includes a whole host of fun titles like: checking your page’s main content elements, including JavaScript-rendered ones, looking for CSS hidden content, verifying your images ALT descriptions, looking for no-indexation & canonicalization configuration in pages & resources, looking for the HTTP status in the header configuration, validating your mobile web optimization by emulating just about any every device conceivable to man, assessing your page load time and identifying speed issues, identifying render-blocking resources, looking for non-secure resources during HTTPS migrations, Checking your above-the-fold content, validating your Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) implementation and/or implementing it if you don’t currently have it, checking for site indexing, verifying your Robots.txt files, making sure your preferred domain is showing, checking and building your sitemaps, scouring your site looking for broken internal links, making sure that mobile-friendliness issues are resolved, running Google PageSpeed to verify site is loading well and fast, auditing your internal link structure, checking for broken external links, fixing duplicate titles and description issues, ensuring that your keywords are in the URL’s of your pages, and on and on it goes (ad nauseam).

Okay…Tune Back In

The point is simply this; though your webmaster may not be in the forefront of your daily life, they are, no doubt, working diligently behind the scenes. So if you happen to go down to the dungeon to visit them and see them actually playing a round of Dungeons and Dragons, give them a break, they have probably just pulled an all-nighter for you,cleaning your database and updating your themes and plugins and a laundry list of other practical and helpful things which keep your business going online.