It’s Spring, Time To Clean Up Your Web Presence.

What is it about Spring that inspires all of us to finally become fed up with the chaos in our garages, file cabinets and other areas that seem so tolerable the rest of the year?

Call it tradition or instinct, Spring is the time to eliminate the clutter, clean house and set the stage for better things to come. I invite you to take a thorough look at your business’s web presence this year when you get the spring cleaning bug.

To help organize your efforts, we’ve put together a checklist of items to review and clean up this year. Our goal is to help you cover the basics and ensure your prospective customers are finding positive and accurate information about your business online. Once you’ve got these covered, consider the Juicy Website Review to design a plan for growing your business online this year.

Website Hosting and Domains

The easiest thing to overlook is a renewal of hosting and your domain names. This is a great time to review when your company domain names expire. Do you have a number of company domain names that don’t currently point anywhere? If so, make sure to redirect them to your main website domain. If you’ve released new products this year (or plan to), make sure to snap up any domain names that you might regret losing to someone else.

Also, if you’ve had any troubles with your website or email availability, it might be worth reviewing your hosting plan and alternatives to make sure you have the best plan for your needs.

To Do:
[ ] Review the expiration date for all of your domain names
[ ] Make sure all domain names point somewhere useful
[ ] Review your new and planned products and services. Are there any new domain names you might want to register?
[ ] Review your hosting plan and provider to make sure you have a reliable hosting service that fits your needs. Consider your growth plans and how your hosting would scale to keep pace.

Website Content

One of the most common suggestions I make in a website review is to include fresh content. A visitor often questions the validity and state of a business that has no dates or fresh information on their website. “Are they still in business?” or “How current is this information?” races through their subconscious minds unless you show them current dates and fresh content. Nothing screams stale more than the most current blog post being 18 months old.

To Do
[ ] If you have a blog, make sure you have a recent post (as in: this month).
[ ] Post something with a current date, such as an update , upcoming event or recent company news.
[ ] Make a date to add fresh content by adding a recurring event on your calendar to update your website weekly or monthly.
[ ] Read your website content. Is it still relevant? All the people in your staff section still around? Are your best products and services featured? Anything to add?

Business Profiles

It’s a great time to review your business profiles in the major search engines and local business listing sites. Even if you have done nothing, your business name, address and phone are scattered across the web. By claiming and/or updating your listings in a few key places, you can ensure that accurate information will be found.

We recommend at a minimum to focus on Google Places, Bing Maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp, YP.com and Localeze.com. Check out our post about local online marketing This post will arm you with everything you need to know to check the status and claim or edit your business profiles.

To Do
[ ] Check the status of your business profiles. Are you found? Is the information correct?
[ ] Claim all of your business profiles that you can
[ ] Edit any outdated or otherwise incorrect information. Most sites require that you “claim” the listing first.
[ ] Beef up your listings with your logo, photos and video wherever possible
[ ] Include what you do with your company name if possible. For example, we might list ourselves as Juicy Results Internet Marketing, instead of just Juicy Results. Caution: Never keyword stuff. Your listing title must read as if it was a real business name.

Search Results

First of all, search for your company and product names in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Is the entire first page returning positive and accurate results that paint the compelling picture you’d want? If not, consider releasing more content online to help fill those results pages.

Next, take a look at the page descriptions—the short sentence that describes the page—to make sure it is clear and specific to that page. Would a customer click on the link based on that short description?

A good web page description

To Do:
[ ] Search for your company and product names in all major search engines
[ ] Make sure that the page titles and descriptions are accurate and compelling
[ ] Release more content to saturate those search results (new pages, press releases, posts on review websites, etc)

Just like our garages and hard drives, it’s easy to accumulate dust and clutter over time online—leaving you with a messy web presence. Once you make the effort to whip it into shape, its much easier to keep it organized and use it more effectively.

If you’re serious about using Internet marketing to grow your business, we recommend the Juicy Website Review, where out experts will give you clear and actionable direction on how to use your website and Internet marketing to win new customers.

Keep an eye out for a follow up post, scheduled for next week, where I will cover some more advanced marketing tips that you can implement to sharpen your Internet marketing efforts.

Why always “not yet”? Do flowers in spring say “not yet”? ~Norman Douglas

Here is one, uninterrupted list of to dos from the article above:

Internet Marketing Spring Cleaning Checklist

[ ] Review the expiration date for all of your domain names
[ ] Make sure all domain names point somewhere useful
[ ] Review your new and planned products and services. Are there any new domain names you might want to register?
[ ] Review your hosting plan and provider to make sure you have a reliable hosting service that fits your needs. Consider your growth plans and how your hosting would scale to keep pace.
[ ] If you have a blog, make sure you have a recent post (as in: this month).
[ ] Post something with a current date, such as an update , upcoming event or recent company news.
[ ] Make a date to add fresh content by adding a recurring event on your calendar to update your website weekly or monthly.
[ ] Read your website content. Is it still relevant? All the people in your staff section still around? Are your best products and services featured? Anything to add?
[ ] Check the status of your business profiles. Are you found? Is the information correct?
[ ] Claim all of your business profiles that you can
[ ] Edit any outdated or otherwise incorrect information. Most sites require that you “claim” the listing first.
[ ] Beef up your listings with your logo, photos and video wherever possible
[ ] Include what you do with your company name if possible. For example, we might list ourselves as Juicy Results Internet Marketing, instead of just Juicy Results. Caution: Never keyword stuff. Your listing title must read as if it was a real business name.
[ ] Search for your company and product names in all major search engines
[ ] Make sure that the page titles and descriptions are accurate and compelling
[ ] Release more content to saturate those search results (new pages, press releases, posts on review websites, etc)