Free Website Content
New Year's Resolutions for Your Website
As all of us view the new year, we determine
various ways to improve ourselves. Whether its eliminating
bad habits, or improving quality of life, January 1st
is seen as a new beginning and starting point. Your
website too, can use a new look. Consider taking the
website to task with these down and dirty quick improvement
tips for the new year.
New Year's Resolutions for Your Website
Revamp your website. The Internet is evolving at a rapid
pace, and websites need constant maintenance and occasional
overhauls. As the search engines improve their algorithms,
website copy and designs will need to be updated. Here
are some starting points:
Remove Bad Outgoing Links
It is important that you are not linking to bad
neighbors. Broken links give an unprofessional image
and wastes a site visitor. Be sure that all outgoing
site links are still valid, and even more importantly,
go where you had initially intended. Many popular websites
are sold by companies with questionable content. Remove
any changed links so that you are not associated with
content that is not relevant to your products, service
or content.
Unique Titles
Confirm each webpage on your website contains a
unique title tag. Not only do unique titles allow you
to optimize different sections of your site for different
keywords and phrases, but also helps search engines
direct traffic to specific pages on your site when specialized
keywords are used.
Optimize Graphics
Optimize website graphics to decrease the website's
load time. A typical web surfer will only remain on
a page for a few seconds. If you do not grab their attention,
you will lose them. Shaving size off of a websites graphic
elements will mean that their eyes are on your website
during those critical seconds.
Update Copyright Notice
A copyright notice should reflect the year the last
updates were made to the website. A current copyright
notice tells visitors that the content is fresh, not
stale and outdated.
Clean up HTML
HTML is a markup language and with constant maintenance
it is easy to have a page with an unclosed tag. While
some web browsers make allowances for poorly formed
HTML, not all do. Therefore, it is important that you
take a look at the HTML behind the web page and make
sure that it is properly formed.
Update Meta Tags
Update and optimize meta tags to avoid excessive
use of keywords. While a once popular search engine
optimization technique, stuffed meta tags generally
result in search engine penalties. Update meta tags
to be accurate and concise without redundancy and recurring
words.
Automate
If your site does not currently use templates or
server-side includes, it is time to bite the bullet.
Spending time now, by employing server side includes
or templates will mean easier maintenance and updates
later. When you change one item, it will update on all
pages of your site.
Links
Increase the quality and quantity of inbound links.
Links coming into your site should be from websites
that contain related or relevant content. Links from
related .edu and .org domains are considered of a higher
value than generic links. Any outbound links, should
be directed to credible websites that contain related
content. The relationship and relevance of links is
becoming increasingly more important in most of the
search engine ranking algorithms.
Wrapped Content
Links that are embedded in a paragraph rather than
a free standing, generally are viewed more favorably
by search engines. Consider wrapping links in content
summaries.
Size Matters
A website must contain enough relevant content to stand
on its own. Obviously the more the better. However,
its not just about quantity it is also about quality.
While size matters, relevance is equally important.
A website should be able to stand on its own, once affiliate
links, and pay per click advertising is removed the
site should still have value.
Aged Domains
They say with age comes wisdom. Apparently the Search
Engine Gods feel the same about domains. The older the
domain the better it will typically perform. Give new
domains time to age.
A New Years resolution is just a fancy
way of saying that you are committed to doing something.
Resolve to improve your website this year.
About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com
software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds
and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for
NotePage http://www.notepage.net
a wireless text messaging software company.
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be greatly appreciated send an email to sharon@notepage.net
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