Social Media means new ways of communicating and new technologies for connecting with your current and prospective persons of interest. Sometimes overlooked is starting with basics and making what you now have both work better and be more social. Here are some ideas on where to start:
1. How well does your website perform in search? Try searching for both your company and for key words in which you should perform well. Do you?
2. Use the tools that you have to check your site. Do you have access to Google Analytics and/or Google Webmaster. These are two invaluable tools to see just how Google and the rest of the word find and see you.
3. Do you have a flash front end? Google still does not like or rank flash well, so if you include it, be sure that is falls on a page that otherwise is HTML based.
4. How do your URL’s read? If they read like English, you’re likely in good shape. If on the other hand, they contain numbers and other odd characters, put a revised URL structure near the top of your todo list.
5. Goes everything land where its supposed to. This seems so basic, but I still frequently find client legacy websites with pages that result in 404/page not found errors. Those need to be redirected to appropriate pages.
6. Canonical resolution. In a nutshell, make sure you can get to your website either by typing http:// or by typing http://www. before it. If one or the other does not work, get it to work yourself or contact your webhost.
7. Loading times. Be sure that nothing on your site takes inordinately long to load. If it does, find out why and get it fixed. Sometimes its just oversized graphics that can cause the problem. Google may soon include loading time as a factor in site ranking.
8. Try multiple browsers. How is your site performing using different versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari?
9. Mobile friendly. How well does your site work on various mobile devices like Blackberry, iPhones and others?
10. Simple navigation. Is it easy and direct to get to all pages on your site? It should be, which means that you shouldn’t have to go through multiple pages to arrive at any destination.
11. Fresh content. Prior to implementing a blog component to your site, be sure that the content is all current. Plan a regular update schedule to keep it that way. Don’t let it get behind.