The beginning of the year is a good time to perform an annual review of your website and make the necessary tweaks and fixes to address any issues you find.

Your WordPress and Plugin Versions

• What Version of WordPress Are You Using?

  As of this post, the current version of WordPress is 2.9.1. If you’re a version or two (or five) behind, it’s time to upgrade. Seriously. It’s the best way to keep WordPress secure, and it’s now freakishly easy to do.

• Review Your Plugins

  Take a look at the plugins you have installed and deactivate and delete any that are not absolutely necessary. Plugins load and call scripts, make server and database requests and use system resources, so you should only keep and maintain the ones you really need and use.

  Make sure the ones you keep are using their most recent version. Update any that aren’t.

Your Domain Name

• Review Your Domain Name Record

  Don’t let outdated information cause you to miss renewals and other important notices. Verify that the contact names and addresses on your domain record are correct once a year.

• Check Website Email Addresses

  Review the email addresses you have created on your domain name and make sure they all still work and serve a purpose. Delete any unused/outdated accounts.

Your Visibility in the Search Engines

• Check Which Pages of Your Site Have Been Indexed

  The Advanced Google Search Page has a means for identifying the pages on a specific base URL that have been indexed by Google. Enter the domain name (Base URL) in the Domain search box and leave the search terms box empty. Click on enter and the number of pages indexed on that URL and a link to each page will appear. Check and make sure you don’t have any pages indexed that you don’t want indexed, like the download page for your mailing list freebie. If someone can get your freebie without subscribing to your list, you’ve got a leak in your subscription bucket that needs repair.

• Verify Your Site’s Title, Description and Keywords

  Review your site’s title, description and keywords and update them, if necessary. If you have not set these yet, download DIY SEO for Your WordPress Site and follow its instructions to optimize your site for the search engines.

Your Navigation

• Search Capability

  Do you have a prominent search feature available no matter where you’re at on your site? Your navigation helps, but giving your visitors a way to search for what they’re looking for makes your site much more usable.

  And what if you could find out what your readers were searching for…without doing polls? So that you could be the one to give it to them. Imagine what that could do for your blog! The WordPress plugin, Psychic Search, does exactly that!

• Are Your 404 and Search Results Pages Useful?

  By useful, I mean do they truly help your readers? If someone follows a broken link to your site, they’ll get a 404 Error – Not Found page. Does that page help them find what they were looking for, or does it just tell them, in essence, “Too bad – what you’re looking for is not here.” And what happens if someone searches for something that is not found on your site? What are they told and do you give them any help finding what they were looking for?

  Here is my 404 Error page…
  

  

  404 Error Page

  … and my search results page when the search term is not found.
  

  You can see that on each, I give my readers some tools to help them find what they were looking for.

• Do You Have Good Internal Linking?

  Internal linking is when you link to your own content from your own content. This helps your readers find more of your content and helps your SEO, too. Check this post from ProBlogger.net: Interlinking Posts for more on the topic. Another way to accomplish internal linking is to use a plugin like Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

• Pare Down Your Blogrolls

  Listing links in a blogroll in your sidebar is fine – except when the list is 50 miles long and is of interest only to you. If you have a link list, take a moment to review it and see if everyone still belongs there. Linking to these sites from your content is more effective, anyway, because then your readers have context for what those links are and why they should click them.

• Clean Up Your Categories and Tags

  Review your categories and tags and delete any that you’re not using. (The listings of each, available from the Posts menu in your dashboard, show you how many posts each is associated with. Definitely get rid of the ones that show zero, and if that leaves you with more than 100 tags total, take a serious look at the ones that are associated with only 1 or 2 posts and pare your list down further.

• Do You Make It Easy to Find Your Best Content?

  Are your pillar posts easy to find? Are your most popular posts showcased?

• Do You Have Any Broken Links?

  Over time, your site will have broken links. It’s a fact of life online. But your job is to keep your links working and up to date. You can install the Broken Link Checker plugin that will alert you to broken links throughout your site, or you can use the W3C Broken Link Checker to find them.

Your Content:

• Does your site have a distinct, easily recognizable purpose?

  Granted, this question is (can be) rather subjective. The point is: Can anyone tell, just by looking at your home page, who you are, what you do and for whom you do it? If not, it’s time to tweak that front page some more. It’s just as important for your “right” people to be able to identify that you and what you offer are for them as it is for your “wrong” people to identify that you’re not.

• Is that purpose reinforced throughout the site?

  Again, this can be somewhat subjective, but look through your site with the eyes of a visitor as best you can. Does the rest of your site reinforce your site’s purpose?

• No Author Biographies

  Like it or not, today’s web is a social web. When doing business online, you must do everything you can to build the “know, like and trust” factor. If you don’t have an About page that tells your site visitor who the person is behind the anonymity of the website, you’re missing a huge opportunity to build that trust.

• No Author Photo

  Come on now…put your picture on your About page. (I don’t like seeing my own mug online, either…but my picture is up there. If I can do it – so can you.)

  If you’ve got a picture on your site – how many years old is it? Maybe it’s time for an update, yes?

• Do Your Post Titles Suck?

  Take a walk down memory lane (or in this case, through your archives) and look only at the titles of your posts. Are they great titles, or could you do better? You can fix them, you know, and as long as you don’t change the permalink for that post, you’ll be just fine and your readers will thank you.

• Links Don’t Say Where They Go

  Not only are you wasting an SEO opportunity when you use link text like click here, you aren’t enticing your readers all that much to click through. Get into the habit of writing so that your link text describes where they’d go if they click.

  Bad: If you’d like more information, click here to contact me.
  Good: If you’d like more information, contact me.

  Bad: There are some great New Year’s resolution posts here and here.
  Good: There are some great New Year’s resolution posts at IttyBiz and Dream Garden Coaching.
  Even better: There are some great New Year’s resolution posts on Goal Setting Accountability and Playing To Your Strengths.

• Does Your Site Suffer from Excessive Flair?

  What’s excessive flair, you ask? Too many widgets, gizmos, bells and whistles – in other words, it’s too busy. Again, a subjective thing, but have a look anyway. Check your home page first, your sidebars second. Pretend you had to pay $100 for each thing to appear there – is each one worth it? Make each item justify the real estate it occupies.

• Do You Have a Regular Publishing Frequency?

  Ugh…ok, I must hang my head on this one. Do they make a Metamucil for blogger’s irregularity? I spent the last week of December really looking at this and I realized there were a number of factors contributing to my irregular publishing frequency:

  • The busier I get with client work, the less I publish. (I was hopping busy in Nov. & Dec. with client work.)
  • The more going on with the kids, the less I publish. (To say there was a lot going on with the kids would be the biggest understatement of 2009. The hits just kept on coming in this department.)
  • The more I feel overwhelmed, the less I publish. (Yeah, by the time the kids started winter break, I was ready to just crawl under my desk and suck my thumb.)
  • The more of a plan I have, the more I publish. (Hmm…there’s a clue.)

  Take a look at your publishing frequency. If you’re happy with it, continue on. But, if you’re not, take some time to figure out what’s getting in your way and make a plan to address those things.

• Update Your Time References and Copyright

  Check your copyright date – is it current? If it isn’t now reading 2010, you’re looking outdated. Speaking of outdated, do you have any content that is outdated and needs updating? Any time references that need to be updated, like maybe on your About page? Do you talk about ‘last year’ and now what you’re talking about is really three years ago? Update those references.

• Test Your Forms

  Does your contact form work? Have you tried using yourself? Give it a whirl, just for grins. Make sure you get the email it’s supposed to send you.

  How about your opt-in forms? Have you been all the way through your opt-in process yourself, so you know what your readers are experiencing? Definitely want to give those a spin, and it’s a good idea to subscribe to your own stuff, anyway.

Take some time over the weekend to perform an annual review of your website. You’ll be glad you did.

Once upon a time there was a lovely woman in Georgia named Laura who started a blog on a topic she was most passionate about: taking risks. She named it A Risk a Day, and as such, intended to blog every day about taking risks in life and business.

While she had no lack of material or ideas for this blog, you can guess what happened…or rather, what didn’t happen. Soon the demands of life and business took over and she wasn’t blogging everyday. What was once such an energizing project had become something she avoided. Taking risks was no less a part of her makeup or her personal mantra, but blogging every day did not fit her lifestyle or how she worked her business.

So, I’m pretty sure the first risk she took was admitting to herself that this wasn’t working out quite the way she’d planned, and that she might have bitten off more than she could chew.

The second risk she took was admitting as much to me and asking for help figuring out what to do. (That REALLY impressed me, because too often we’re unwilling – too embarrassed or vulnerable or…- to risk admitting we need help.)

I asked her, “Is there any reason you need to be the only one writing for that blog? Would you be willing to risk inviting others to write about risk with you?” She took a third risk and invited some of her favorite women friends – all risk-takers in their own right – to become regular contributing authors at Risk A Day.

I’m happy to report that Risk A Day now boasts 20-and-counting regular contributors – myself included – who’ve agreed to take a day each month and write about risk with her. My day is the 17th each month, so my post went up this morning.

I’m going to take a risk here and invite you to come read my post and leave a comment. Read through the other 16 posts that are already there (we started Nov. 1) and see if you don’t have a new, favorite blog to subscribe to!

I’m pretty sure Laura would agree that taking all these risks has paid off. She’s found a new way to achieve the goal she set for herself, she’s creating a community of like-minded women who support each other and contribute unique and diverse perspectives on something we each face every day – taking risks – and she’s loving her blog again.

• The Strategy of Not Being Strategic – The Fluent Self
  An example of a non-sleazy sales page.
• Creating a sales page that converts
  Here's a basic formula to writing good copy that has been tested and is proven to work. Once you've created a successful sales page, you own a template that you can use repeatedly, customizing it to fit other products. Your template will be like having a golden goose.
• How to Sell More Ethically | Copyblogger
  Tips on how to write an effective sales page.
• Giving WordPress Its Own Directory « WordPress Codex
  A participant on today's Free Q&A Call asked how to move WordPress to the root directory of a hosting account if it was first installed in a subdirectory. This is WordPress' answer to how to move your WordPress files to a subdirectory while leaving your blog in the root folder of your hosting account, which means it's also the answer to my particpant's question – except the direction the files are moving is reversed. (Plus you don't have to do Step 6 at all.)
• Twitter / Search Widget
  Interesting Twitter tool discussed on today's Free Q&A call. This widget provides a steady stream of tweets based on a given keyword search term you define. Can be words, @usernames, #hashtags, etc.

If you’ve been building a business online for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard, “The money is in the list.” And back before blogs arrived on the scene, it was not only true, but pretty darn clear. We did everything we could to encourage people to subscribe to our newsletter mailing lists, and we diligently produced newsletters to stay in contact with those subscribers.

But now we have blogs and we publish new content on a regular basis. People can subscribe to our RSS feeds and receive those content updates automatically through a feed reader or via email. Does that mean we don’t need our newsletters anymore?

I think we do need our newsletter mailing lists, but maybe now that we have more options where staying in contact with our subscribers is concerned (not to mention different types of subscribers!), we should become a little more strategic about how we do things.

First, it might be helpful to explore the main difference between an opt-in mailing list and an RSS subscriber list: how you get the message delivered.

With an opt-in mailing list, you send them an email. With an RSS list, you publish a new blog post. Sending an email directly to their inbox is more private than a new blog post published for all the world to see on your blog. That is an important distinction, because you might need to send a message that is either not for public eyes, or you might just not want to muck up your blog, for whatever reason. Being able to get messages through to the people who are interested in what you’re doing without the “public-ness” of blog posts can come in quite handy.

Second, it might be time to rethink what goes in your newsletter.

I’ve seen a lot of newsletters in my day, and many of them used to have several sections to them, one of which was usually an article of some sort. My own newsletter used to be like that. Well, I don’t know about you, but it didn’t take long for me to find myself in a quandary – do I put the article on my blog, or do I save it for my newsletter? I think my blog is a much better use of my articles than my newsletter. More people get to see them and I get SEO benefits for my site from them. So what’s left in my newsletter? Announcements, special offers, all that stuff I don’t want to publish on my site, for whatever reason. You know…news. (Gasp!)

Third, it might be good to know who your subscribers are.

In my case, I have about 4 times the number of RSS subscribers as I have opt-in list subscribers. That’s on purpose, on my part. I also have about 2 times the number of visitors to my site as I have RSS subscribers. Said another way, about half the people who visit my blog become RSS subscribers (and more than half of those subscribe through a feed reader, not through email.) About 1/8th the number of people who visit my site have opted in on a mailing list. (You get a free e-book when you do that.) Then about half that number of people are on a private, invitation-only mailing list I have for clients.

Here’s a picture of how I see these different groups from a relationship-with-me perspective.

It’s not that my RSS subscribers don’t love me, it’s just that the nature of the relationship we have is a little looser because of how they’re subscribed. Because they haven’t opted in to a mailing list, they don’t get any of the “private information” I send out but don’t publish on my blog. So, they don’t know as much as my opt-in subscribers do. That’s even more true of my client mailing list as compared to my other opt-in lists. They get the low-down on just about everything going on with me. My relationship with my clients is pretty tight.

If I didn’t have an opt-in mailing list service, I wouldn’t be able to maintain these closer relationships with my clients, and that just wouldn’t do…at least not for me. I’m very relationship-driven, and I derive a great deal of pleasure from the relationships I build in my business, and I just wouldn’t be happy in business without them.

I should also point out that some people are on all of these lists. They want to get the “inside” information, and they also want to get each update from the site. You’ll have that situation, too.

So, yes, I still need my mailing list, but the content of what I send out has changed since my newsletter days.

When I take the time to write an article, it goes on my blog…period. With opt-in lists in place, I have the option of “reminding” those folks to check out the latest article on the blog by providing a link to it, rather than the whole article, while sharing information that isn’t necessarily appropriate for my blog. This keeps my blog nice and tidy. Nice and tidy is good.

Social networking can be not only fun, but productive, as well. In Tip #6 of 7 Social Networking Tips for the Busy Entrepreneur, I tell you to automate to leverage your time and extend your reach.

Hmmm…social networking…automation…is that really a good idea? Seems counter-intuitive, at first glance, at least to me. But the biggest hazard of social networking is the time suck effect it can have on your day, which of course, is the lure of automation…4-hour work week and all that jazz. Somehow, though, automation in social networking feels somewhat anti-social, doesn’t it?

I’m going to go on record here and say that I’m not a fan of auto-DMs on Twitter. I don’t like being thanked for following someone only to be thanked 13 more times in the next 10 minutes. I don’t feel all that thanked by then – I feel spammed. I used to know how to set up an automatic DM (Direct Message) to people who follow me, but after being the recipient of it going bezerk too many times when I followed other people who use it, I quickly removed it…and deleted it from my memory banks. Making people feel spammed (on purpose or by accident) is not a good way to win friends and influence people.

On the other hand, does it really make a difference if I personally take the time to log in to Twitter and tweet the fact that I have a new blog post up on my site or if I have a little automation helping me out? As long as the automation method is reliable and doesn’t start spamming the Twitterverse, I think it doesn’t matter. There’s no value added by me personally typing it versus a little program Tweeting it for me. The net result is the same: I have Tweeted my new blog post. The time savings, however, are HUGE.

I’m an advocate for effective automation in social networking that doesn’t compromise your authenticity (so that leaves out farming out all of your social networking updates to your VA.) If all that’s going on is some mindless notification update at each social networking site I use, I say bring on the advantages of technology! When I post something new here, it automatically gets Tweeted, added to my Facebook account, my LinkedIn account, and a handful of other social networking sites I use for various reasons. I save loads of time and LOTS more people get notified that I have published something new. THAT’s what I’m talking about when I say leverage your time and extend your reach.

Of course, if that’s all you do, it’s going to be really obvious really soon, so you want to make the rounds to the social networking sites on a regular basis and actually interact at each one. The kind of automation I advocate does not take the place of you interacting at these sites…it just saves you administrative time. In fact, I now use the administrative time I save to get social on Twitter and Facebook.

Another thing I do that helps keep my various social networking sites active AND helps a few of my blogging friends is I have my little automation helper set up to automatically Tweet the blog posts of a very select few other bloggers. By very select few, I mean very select few…3, to be exact. These are folks who I have NEVER seen post a half-assed post in any way, shape or form. I’ve been reading them all for over a year now, and never once have I seen them post anything but great quality posts. (To tell you how selective I am – I don’t even qualify by my own selection criteria!) When I noticed that I was always Tweeting their posts because they were so good, I realized I really ought to automate it and save myself a little more time.

People have asked me if I’d hook their social networking stuff up like I have my own, and finally, I have a service that does exactly that to offer! The methods I use do not require that your blog be a WordPress blog – any blog with an RSS feed will work. And if you’re not on Twitter yet, I recommend you set up a profile…yesterday. (Twitter is the one social networking site that seems to have people from all industries, all fields, all target markets. Doesn’t seem to matter what you do or who you serve – you’re likely to find at least some of your peeps on Twitter.)

So, get your Social Networking Hook-up today and start leveraging your time and extending your reach!

Today, I have a tale to tell you about changing domain names in the hopes that you can learn from my mistakes and avoid the knots I got on my forehead.

Once upon a time, I thought I wanted to be a Virtual Assistant. So I decided to create a website, and of course, the first thing I needed was a domain name. I had decided the name of my fledgling business would be Suzanne-Bird-Harris.com (don’t you just love the creativity? LOL), but at that time, that domain name was not available. I ended up settling for vAssistantSvcs.com. I set up an email account on that domain, but since I had one client who took up most all of my time, I procrastinated about setting up a website.

A few years went by, and I had several clients, but I wasn’t their VA, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I had built their websites and I did Internet/website-related things for them once their sites were up. Word-of-mouth was the only means by which I gained new clients, and it got to be very embarrassing to be a web designer without a website to refer people to. So…I broke down and threw up a website on my domain.

Over time, I got more and more frustrated trying to relay my domain name over the phone (‘v’ sounds like ‘b’ and you can’t just say ‘services abbreviated’ because a surprising number of people don’t know that the abbreviation for services is ‘svcs’.) There’s the first lesson: Make sure others can easily understand your domain name when you say it, because they won’t always be clicking on a link to get to you. This is particularly important if your business is already enjoying great word-of-mouth growth! Make sure it’s easy to say and relay to others.

So, I went back to GoDaddy and checked to see if vAssistantServices.com was available yet. And it was! So I bought it with a quickness that would give you whiplash. Ha! Problem solved!

Uhh…not. By this time I had discovered WordPress and vAssistantSvcs.com was a blog with lots of posts and pages which our good buddy, Google, had indexed. All my content was on the hard-to-say domain name.

Around this time is when I learned about BlueHost, so I decided to move all of my websites (I had several by this time) over there. I setup vAssistantServices.com as the primary domain and moved all of my content to it. At last, I had all my content on the right domain name! My celebrating was short-lived, though, because our good buddy, Google, didn’t know about vAssistantServices.com – all of the indexing of my content had been done under the old domain name. All of those links I’d spread far and wide across the Internet were now invalid and gave a ‘Page Not Found’ error message. Gone was my Page Rank, my Alexa rank shot up into the millions again, and all my SEO work was trashed.

I started poking around in my hosting account and found something called ‘Addon Domains’ which would allow me to add the old domain name to this new hosting account, so that’s exactly what I did. I pointed vAssistantSvcs.com at the root directory of my account, and voila! Either domain worked and all my links worked again! I began using the new domain name, confident that the old domain still worked.

A few months later, I noticed that my two domain names had different Alexa ranks and different Page Ranks. Huh? What was going on? I really only had one set of content, shouldn’t both domain names have the same stats? Then it dawned on me – in using the Addon Domains feature and pointing the old domain name to the root directory of my content, I committed the Duplicate Content sin: I had two separate websites with exactly the same content.

Here’s the second lesson: What I should have done, instead, was a 301 Permanent Redirect, which is essentially like doing a change of address with the Post Office. Then, anyone clicking any link using the old domain would be automatically redirected to that same link at the new domain name, which was all I was after.

So, I had to undo the Addon Domain thing and go back to GoDaddy (where all my domain names live) and set up a 301 Redirect of vAssistantSvcs.com to vAssistantServices.com. Now, all is right in my world again.

Moral(s) of the Story:

1. Choose your domain name wisely. Make sure it’s easy to remember, easy to spell, easy to say and easy to understand when spoken over the phone.
2. Use a 301 Redirect on the old domain when you move your content to a new domain name. Don’t do what I did and inadvertently or unknowingly cause yourself Duplicate Content problems by using the Addon Domain feature of your hosting account.

P.S. This only works when all you’ve changed is the domain name. If you’ve moved your content into WordPress from an HTML site (which changes the URLs for your content), then there are other redirects you’ll need to do to preserve the links already indexed by Google and used by others. But that’s a story for another day…

P.P.S. Suzanne-Bird-Harris.com is still not a particularly great name for my business from a branding perspective. I still get a lot of inquiries from people wanting me to do traditional VA work for them. But I keep it for 3 reasons:

1. I could be considered a highly specialized VA, so the name isn’t just totally inapplicable.
2. I’ve had this name for a 7 years and counting, so most of the world knows me by this name, 100% appropriate, or not.
3. I haven’t thought of a better one. (If you do, please share. LOL)

This blog post round-up once again brings a little something for everyone. As always, read what you like, leave the rest.

Does It Matter If I Use 1 Plugin Or 100s Of Them?

by Keith Dsouza at WeblogToolsCollection.com.
You might be wondering this very same thing. I was glad to see I answer this question the same way Keith does in this post.

It’s Time to Shoot Your Blog

by Jon Morrow at Copyblogger.com
In every area of life, it’s really valuable to know when to quit and when to stick. When it comes to the topic of blogging, this is a really great post on how to determine if it’s time to shoot your blog and start over. It’s also a really great post to read to confirm you’re on the right track.

Unselfish Self Promotion

by Wendy Limauge (quoting Jorge Olson) at BusinessBloggingGuide.com
If the idea of self promotion gives you the willies, read this post. It’ll calm you.

How to Find People to Follow on Twitter

by pholpher at Performancing.com
If you’re new to Twitter, this is a great little post about how to get started.

The Foolproof Plan for Blogging When You Have Nothing to Say

by Ryan Stephens at RyanStephensMarketing.com
Who among us hasn’t run into this problem? Great advice for when you do.

Claim Your Name on Facebook for your Personal Brand

by Dave Saunders at DaveSaunders.net
Now Facebook lets you create an easy-to-remember web address for your Facebook web address. Dave tells you how, and gives some great advice in the process. I’ve got mine: http://www.facebook.com/suzanne.bird.harris