2008: Web Readiness Checklist
Here is a list of items to check so your website is current for 2008.

• Update your copyright and/or privacy policy statements

If you have a copyright notice on your site, make sure it is up to date. If you have a privacy policy, review it to make sure it accurately describes your current policy toward handling your customers' personal information.

• Review your company information
  Check your staff listing or directory, is it up-to-date with correct names, titles, and other contact information? If you have an "About Us" page or something similar that discusses company history, make sure it's updated.
  
  
• Review and test your contact forms
  Review contact forms to make sure they work. Are they easy to use? Also, be sure to "break" the form—submit it without the required information and see how understandable the resulting error message is.
  
• Review your email routing
  If you list service@yourdomain.com as the main contact address on your site, is it being routed to the correct person? If your shopping cart sends order information to orders@yourdomain.com, is that going where it needs to go? Make sure your email routing reflects any organizational changes you've had.
  
• Review your domain record
  Make sure your domain registrar has current contact information for you. If they don't, you might miss renewal notices and other important announcements about your domain.
  
• Run your pages through a link- checker.
  This will assure that all of your pages are linked together. Search engines hate when pages have broken links. http://validator.w3.org/checklink
  
• Commit to Creating Content
  Top ranking is driven by fresh quality content. Whether you choose to create the content on your site, or elsewhere with a link back - regularly created relevant content keeps the search engine spiders crawling your website.
  
• Get Serious about Site Structure & Sitemaps
  When was the last time you looked at your website structure? Website elements such as URLs and navigation between pages can play a major role in your SEO success. Make sure the structure of your site is reinforcing your SEO goals.
  
• Understand Your SEO Successes with Analytics
  It’s amazing how many people are still measuring their success with primitive hit counters or even worse, no analytics at all. And more importantly - understand the proper measures of your success.
  
  Successful SEO isn't always going to equal more sales, so make sure to track the right metrics such as rankings on your keyword hit list, and organic traffic from search engines.
  
• Make sure every page of your website gets people to take some kind of action.
  Maybe you want people to buy something right then. Maybe you want them to sign-up for your newsletter. Maybe you want them to call you on the phone or send an email with more questions. Maybe you want them to visit another page of your website for more details before they call you.

Whatever the case, this is the single most important thing you can do this week to assure you are setup for 2008. Tell your website visitors what you want them to do next.

-----------------------

This article written by Teajai Kimsey, Interenet Marketing Strategist, Ideas That Work - January 2008
It may be reproduced and reprinted provided the author's information including web link is kept intact.