April 24, 2013

Just like your home, your small business website also needs a yearly spring-cleaning. It’s easy to let things slide, and the consequence of that would be a steady decline in traffic, reputation and consequently sales. This can be a rather insidious way for you to lose traction with your site, as you don’t necessarily see it occurring. But it’s very real, and will have very real results.

Here are 5 simple actions you can take which will make a big difference in the way your sites appear, operate and prosper:
spring-clean-site

5 Simple Actions to Make a BIG Difference>

  1. How fast do your pages load? – You have under 10 seconds to load your page or most people will exit and go somewhere else. Some reasons for slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This really is something you want to check into, as Google will punish your site in the search rankings if your pages take too much time to load.
  2. Defunct products, programs, and links – Make sure and remove old products, programs and especially links that are no longer pertinent. Nothing irritates a user more than going somewhere and finding they can’t get there or the item is unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages will even affect your search rankings, as well.
  3. Old content and images – Likewise cull out stale, no longer topical content and images. Your old pictures from your company picnic in 2007 might not be considered fresh content, and that is what folks and search engines both want!
  4. Social media – Make sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up to date with them. Pinterest and Instagram are later entries that might not be displayed with your social buttons.
  5. More fresh content that rocks – There isn’t anything you can do to help in this respect more than to provide a fresh dose of new, relevant to 2013 content! If you have content on the first page of your blog that is more than a month old, you definitely should be more proactive with your content strategy.

It’s spring, and time to get about cleaning. You’ll be glad you did!

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