The webmaster is one of the most classic between the web professions. It is not only involved with the creation of websites, but their management and maintenance in compliance with international standards are the heart of his work. Its activity intersects with those of other web specialists and assignments may vary depending on the size and complexity of the company for which he works.
According to the Page Personnel study of Italian salary, the webmaster is part of the professions related to information technology, so it is more a technical area related with computer science than with marketing and communication. The average gain in Italy is between 20 and 22 thousand euros gross per year in the first 18 months, between 22 and 24 thousand euros for up to 36 months of experience, from 24 to 28 thousand euros over 36 months. The possibility of career development is proposed to web architect, who is the head of the development team of the website, as well as manager of information architecture.
About the building of a website, the webmaster can contribute to the strategic planning of the structure, but usually the developer is the professional that writes the code, while the graphics part is matter of the web designer. They are different professionals, everyone skilled in his field. If the company decides to make a website easier by adopting platforms WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), in example WordPress, they can hire a webmaster with transversal knowledge that allow them to build a comprehensive medium complexity website.
As has already been mentioned, the management of the website is the hub of the webmaster who is responsible for the health of the website. Let us briefly what are its tasks.
- The webmaster checks the problems of the website through Google Webmaster Tool that allows him to detect any errors and to find useful data for the optimization on search engines. From here you can upload the sitemap and the robots.txt, actions which make the search engine find useful information within the site. For example, it can monitor the internal and external links and it can identify what are the most searched query and those that have the highest click through ratio, supporting the Seo activity.
- The webmaster updates the CMS to maintain high website safety standards. Internet evolves so quickly and threats do the same. For this reason, you should never drop your guard. A platform like WordPress helps the webmaster with periodic updates to face the dangers of the web. Needless to say, timely updates are needed to preserve health.
- The webmaster is responsible for safety and so he is always up to date on the structural problems of the website. It does so through the use of alerts about the presence of unnatural links, discrepancies or sudden drops in the Google SERPs ranking.
- The webmaster scans the links on the website and corrects the mistakes. For example, it may happen that a link points to a page that has been removed without our knowledge (we can not monitor all of the web!). In this case it appears an Error 404 page, very bad for Google and for the user. Through periodic scans can detect and correct mistakes.
As we have seen, that the webmaster is a typical profession from the information technology area that deals with the management of a website, but it has many points of contact with the web marketing because it provides support to Seo and consequently to the professionals involved in content management. In large companies usually these professions are separated. But in medium complexity companies, the webmaster often is the same person that deals with web marketing assisted by the developer for more complex issues about the server management.
