8 Ways to Make your Website Better in the New Year

The holiday season is a rush of activity, both with your business and personal life. When it's finally time to put up a new calendar you just want to breathe and get back to normal. Maybe you're even looking forward to the quieter days of January. Yes, indeed, take a break, but don't forget to use this down time to do some new years cleaning on your website.

The rest of the year is often super busy. If this is the quiet time for you, use it to do some sprucing up of your website and marketing. Perhaps think about what you can add to your marketing efforts this year.  Here are eight ideas to help you get things all clean and shiny for the new year.

1.  Clean up any dead links. Use this broken link checker and find all broken links on your site and fix them. The more broken links that google sees when it scans your site, the more likely it will consider your site no longer relevant and that means a lower ranking in searches. It benefits you tremendously to make sure all your links are working.
2. Make a change on your front page. Is your website's front page the same as it was last year at this time? If you don't change the content on your front page often, Google can think that it's a dead site and rank you lower in searches. If you like the way your home page is and you don't want to change it, add a featured blog post section you can change regularly or a twitter feed widget.  Even small things like that can make the the site look fresh to the Google spiders.
3. Check your image tags. Did you get lazy last year and stop giving an alt title for the pictures you uploaded? Make sure all images on your site have an alt image tag. Without this tag Search Engines don't know what the picture is. If the picture title corresponds to the copy, then Google and other search engines determine your site is legit and relevant - thus making your website show up higher in search results.
4. Revisit some blog posts. Look back at some old blog posts or content you wrote when you first started the site. Maybe some of the images have broken or you have better information now. Either edit the old blog post or rewrite it and create a new post. Make sure you have image tags, meta information and a good image for your post. Make sure to promote the posts on social media
5. Update your basic info. Nothing makes a website look deserted like a copyright from five years or an about page that is obviously out of date. Update all this basic info. Make sure your about page is filled out and correct. Add an image. If you don't want to add a picture of the staff or you, add an image of the facility, a work station or the town you are in.
6. Don't disregard email marketing. If you've let your email list become covered with cobwebs and haven't used your email service more than a few times last year than you are wasting a potential source of leads and income. Email marketing is not dead by any means, in fact, email marketing has a far better return than social media marketing. Make a marketing plan to send out an email at least once a month. Promote your email list on social media and in your own newsletters. Create something special just for people who join, perhaps an ebook or white paper, a free printable or advance knowledge of sales.
7. Reevaluate social media. Are you on every social media outlet? Maybe you don't need to be. Check out the ones that you have the most engagement on and consider ditching the others. Not every customer base is right for every social media outlet. Is your product a visual one? Make sure you are on Instagram and or Pinterest. These sites have the greatest engagement for many visual products like fashion, home decor, food and beauty.
8. Don't forget video. Video consumption increases like crazy every year. A video in a social media stream is a great way to give people a quick idea of a product or how something works. You don't have to hire an actor or a film crew. Just take some video of your product in action or show a selection of products or even just do images and text. Also, a little tip: uploading video directly to Facebook instead of linking to a youtube video will give you a larger number of views. 

I hope this helps you get a great start to 2016. Happy New Year to all. I hope your business thrives in 2016!