For some small to micro-sized companies the summer holiday season traditionally means a quiet time for business and a chance to catch up with all those get-around-to-it jobs that have been on hold. And high up on this to do list should be the company web site.
Despite the best will in the world, it is often the company web presence that is easiest to neglect at busier times of the year. All the more reason, then, for giving your site some much needed TLC this summer.
So what to do first?
First up, go through the entire site word-by-word to ensure that the text is up to date and still accurately reflects your business, especially things like contact details. If there are wholesale changes to be made, consider whether tweaks to your keywords are required as well.
In general, freshening up and adding new content are sure ways to improve your ranking with search engines. Now is a good time to do just that. Are there a couple of good news stories you can add to the site? Perhaps a new contract you’ve won? Or a new product or line launch?
As well as the content, ensure every link on the company web site is still live. This includes internal and external links, e.g. menu navigation, email forms and any functionality that relies on scripts as well as outbound links to other sites. External site links can become dead links if pages on the target site change or the domain name changes.
Thoroughly test any part of the site that is interactive, ensuring that all customer communications are being received and can be handled promptly.
The thrust of this maintenance is to make certain that everything on your site works the way it should and that the message you are putting out is relevant to the business and its customers now, not six months or a year ago. Any site features that don’t work or are no longer appropriate should be respectively fixed or ditched.
The final step in this quick web site service is to re-submit it to the search engines. Most web hosting packages have special built-in tools within their user control panel to let you do this for free. Normally, it is a one-click affair that automatically submits directly to a limited number of the major search engines. Invariably, there is a paid service option whereby the web host will automatically submit your domains to hundreds of search engines on a regular monthly basis.
While this kind of web promotion is a good staple, think too about being more proactive and checking you have an entry in online directories, business directories and other sites that list suppliers.
