Yearly Recommended Website Maintenance

You can think of yearly website maintenance like replacing the batteries in your smoke detectors. It isn’t very time consuming, and a few simple checks or changes can keep your site in the running for website traffic. The following checklist will help you:

• Verify company and contact information
  • Check your Google, Yahoo and Live Search local listings to make sure your business address and contact information is correct. Continue to ask your clients to post reviews and comments about your company to improve your local search ranking. Check phone, fax, mailing addresses and email addresses. Make sure your forms work by testing them.
  • Check your contact and corporate information on your website, blog, facebook, linkedin page, etc to make sure it accurately reflects your contact information, corporate direction and staff.
  • Check the copyright notice on your website to make sure it is up to date.
  • Check your privacy policy, disclaimers and terms and conditions., and review your blog policy to make sure they are still in line with your business practices.
• Check that the site works for most of your users.
  • Use analytics or site statistics reports to find out how most people are browsing your site. Log into those browsers and view your site to make sure it renders correctly.
  • Check for broken links. Things may have changed over the year, and your site could end up with broken links. Check that you don’t have dead links by using an online tool like this one. http://validator.w3.org/checklink
  • Check the same thing for broken or missing images.
  • Test all your opt-in forms (for newsletters etc.) to make sure they work correctly.
  • Check your password-protected areas.
  • Check your search features on your website.
  • Check your file sizes and download times and your server speed. There is a free tool here: www.netmechanic.net
  • Have your programmer review your style sheets and standards
• Check your search engine visibility. Using your most important keyword phrases, check to see how well your website rates in Google, Yahoo and MSN. It may be time to revisit your link building campaign and add a few more pages of content to garner more search engine interest and visitor interest in your web pages.
  
• Check your domain name record – use whois.net to confirm the information.
  
• Check your auto-responders
  
• If you send automated confirmation messages after someone emails you or after your website processes a form or order, check them to make sure they are up to date.

Just an hour or so of maintenance and checks to your website could prove invaluable to your Internet marketing in 2009. Times are tough and your website may be the most cost effective marketing tool you employ this year!