New Year Objectives for Your Site’s SEO

Well Christmas is almost here, which means the New Year isn’t far behind. So whether you’re recovering from your office party or working feverishly to get everything done before the end of the week, now could be a good time to take stock of your website and plan your objectives for 2011.

A successful site is one that constantly develops. There’s no room for those who are happy standing still. That doesn’t mean that you need to have a complete overhaul every month, but you need a strategy for where you want to go. But, as with any future plan, you need to be realistic.

If you have no budget whatsoever and don’t have the time to re-write content, then adding a blog probably isn’t going to provide the solution. However a structured process for building links – perhaps signing up to five directories a week, or leaving a couple of blog comments elsewhere each day – can help to keep your site building.

Even if you just have a rough idea of where you want your site to be in 12 months time and detail a few stepping stones to get there, this will give you some structure to future efforts. Of course, if you employ an SEO this is something you can do in cooperation with them, but even if you’re going solo working out a basic blueprint can give you real direction when it comes to facing the challenges of 2011.

This might mean flagging up busy times of year, integrating a PPC policy and developing pages for terms that you may have lost traffic for this year. Some other ideas include:

Schedule site content revision – not every page needs updating entirely, but changes may need to be made to better optimise content and to bring it up to date.

Implement a blog – whilst I previously wrote this off for anybody struggling for time, if you do have resources available and want to develop your site a blog is a great solution. You can expand your site, encourage new visitors and create further links (both internal and external).

Fine tuning – If you’re plagued by slow page load times or broken links, maybe 2011 is the year that you finally put pay to these gremlins. They will be holding your site back so these things need to be done – and the sooner the better.

Anyway, this is probably no time to be thinking about SEO. So all that is left for me to say is have a very Merry Christmas and a Prosperous (and impeccably optimised) New Year.