5 Easy Ways to Spruce Up Your Site

Just like your home, your small business website also requires a yearly spring-cleaning. It’s very easy to let things slip, and the consequence of that could be a decline in traffic, reputation and ultimately sales. This can be a rather insidious way for you to lose traction with your website, as you don’t necessarily see it taking place. But it’s very real, and can have very real results.

So in the spirit of prevention, here are 5 ways you can make a positive change in how your sites appear, operate and prosper.

1. How fast do your pages load? – You have under 10 seconds to load your page or the majority of people will exit and head somewhere else. Some reasons for slow loading pages are too many images, pages built mostly with Flash, and errors in your site code. This is something you want to check on, as Google will penalize your site in the search rankings if your pages take too much time to load.
2. Old products, programs, links lurking – You should definitely remove any old product, programs and links that are no longer applicable. Nothing says your page is stale and dated more than your PDF download from 2008 that’s not only dated but unavailable. Dead links and 404 pages don’t help your search rank, either.
3. Old content and images – Likewise cull out stale, no longer relevant content and images. Your old pictures from your company picnic in 2007 might not be considered fresh content, and that is what people and search engines both want!
4. Social media – Make sure that your social media buttons not only link to your current social media sites, but that you are up to date with them. Pinterest and Instagram are later entries that might not be displayed in your social buttons.
5. More fresh content that rocks – There’s nothing you can do to help in this respect more than to inject a fresh dose of new, relevant to 2013 content! If you have content on the first page of your blog that is more than a month old, you definitely should be more active with your content strategy.

Break out your virtual broom and start sweeping. Your visitors will thank you!