Keep Your Christmas Tree and Website Alive!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Photo Credit: Squidoo

Ah yes, the ever majestic and beautiful Christmas tree. It brings much joy and amazement to those who bestow their gaze upon it. Maybe it’s the multi-colored lights or the shiny bulbous ornaments. With a little attention and some elbow grease, you can have the best tree on the block, even if it IS a Charlie Brown tree like Alayna’s! With all real Christmas trees come simple annoyances and daily task; watering, vacuuming up needles, trimming dead branches, squirting the cat with the water bottle so it will stop chewing on the lights. Christmas trees aren’t the only thing that require nurturing, websites and blogs call for regular maintenance and attention as well.

I’m in the spirit of giving this year, so I am going to give some tips on how to keep your website lean and efficient as well as keep your Christmas tree happy and hydrated! Spell Check! Read through all of the content on your website and make sure everything is spelled correctly. Text content, buttons, header graphics…everything. Why potentially lose your credibility as an industry service or product expert if you can’t spell “there” correctly? For you Firefox users, Kyle Claus has a great Spell Checker add-on for you to make this task a little easier and much quicker – Spell Checker 1.3.2

Tree tip #1 Trees are thirsty – make sure you keep a close eye on and replenish your tree’s water supply every day. A freshly cut Christmas tree can consume a gallon of water in 24 hours!

Yule Blog. If you have a blog, keep current on your comments, trackbacks and tags. If you have new comments, reply to them in a professional manner that’s going to provide value to the replier. Tags are important to your blog readers because they help categorize certain posts. If a user needs to search for a specific topic, tags make it easier to separate different content from each topic. If you don’t have a blog for you company website, now is a great time to start!

Tree tip #2 I don’t know why cats love Christmas trees so much. It’s probably the shiny and dangly ornaments or the fact that cat’s like to torment their owners because they know they’ve spent a lot of time making the tree look beautiful. Do you know what cats do not love? Orange peels. That’s right. Sprinkle some orange peels under the tree and take see the look on your cats face next time they slink around the ol’ Tannenbaum.

Stay current Update or remove out-of-date content. Whether it’s news about an event that has passed, a product or service that you no longer provide to your clients or a old photo of you or your employees that looks like it came from your high school yearbook. These changes will show your returning visitors that you care about your content and your site’s appearance.

Tree tip #3 Trim those dead branches. These branches are usually browning or starting to lose their needles (causing them to make a mess on your carpet). Remove them by using small pruning shears or a small handsaw. Please be careful and use caution!

If you follow some of these helpful hints, you won’t have to drag your dead website in the woods on New Years day!