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  Don’t let outdated information cause you to miss renewals and other important notices.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 Delete any unused/outdated accounts.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.