Whether you’re sick or not, most people go to the doctor for an annual check up. Your doctor will check your eyes, ears, heartbeat, lungs, and discuss anything else you may have concerns about. Even though your website is not a living, breathing, organism, it does need to be an evolving, expanding, entity online to reach its full potential. Every now and then, it’s good to give your site a check up. Here is a five-point check up you can complete on your own website to make sure it has a clean bill of health.
- Blog Posts
Check to see how recently you have updated your blog. If your blog hasn’t been updated since 2009, you need to add a new post. Consistent weekly posts are suggested to create a steady stream of new content growth on your website. This is helpful to optimizing your site for search as you’re expanding and validating keywords on your site. Consistency is also important; it helps search engines build trust in your website. - Social Network Connections
If you are marketing your business on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you should ensure that your web traffic can connect to those outlets and vice versa. You can even connect events to Facebook using Facebook Connect. When people sign up for your events it posts a notification on Facebook’s News Feed. Attendees’ friends are then able to see the event and are more likely to attend. - Title Tags and H1 Tags
First, check and make sure you have them (these are tags that tell search engines what your website is about and can be found in the source code of your site). Second, make sure they are unique to each page. These are the most important tags to search engines, they tell the search engine what your site and each page are about so users can find the information they are seeking. The tags should be keyword rich and in harmony with the content on the page. - Calls to Action
Are there clear calls to action on your site? You need to ensure the visitors to your site recognize what you’d like them to do on each page. Whether it’s signing up for a newsletter or downloading a whitepaper, each page should include a call to action that stands apart from the other content on that page and draws attention from the user. - Website Analytics
Make sure you are measuring your calls to action and that you have conversion goals that you are working towards. Gathering website data is so incredibly important; it helps you find out what pages your users visit most and least and what they do while they are on your site. It gives insight to what kind of content your users are looking for and helps you make informed decisions about updates to your website.>
There, that was painless right? How did your website fare? If the results of your site check up passed – that’s great! Be sure to schedule your next regular check up – if you miss an appointment problems can arise and will get worse the longer it takes you to get them checked. Those of you that found you may be missing some of these elements, no need to worry, the doctor can prescribe a remedy for that (what I mean is, talk to your web developers and they should be able to help you out).
Regular check ups are important and taking a step back to review your site as a whole every once in a while helps you assess where you are in accordance to the goals you’ve set out for your site.
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