New Year’s resolutions have become a ritual for many.  This year along with your goal to lose weight or determination to exercise, add some website resolutions to the list.

First and simplest on your list should be website maintenance.  Start by updating the copyright year in the footer of your website.  Doing this will be a signal to those visiting as well as search engines that the site is active and somebody is home.

Go through the title tags for your homepage, landing pages and product pages and add value to them to incentivize searchers who are reading search engine results pages to click onto your page and not your competitor’s.  Examples:  “Sale/Clearance”  “Free Shipping”, etc.  Also, make sure each product page has its own meta description that specifically addresses the product/subject it pertains to.

Doing the above might help you meet another resolution – that is to increase website conversions. Take a look at your logs and analytics.  Use this data to find areas where traffic is falling off, conversions have sunk or bounce rates have increased. Enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) and research new possible keywords or question searches such as “where do I find” and “learn more about” that may lead directly into your site.

Check your links.  This might feel like a boring maintenance job, but you need to do this to make sure all is working properly.

Clean up your text.  Is everything written as well as it can be with no grammatical errors or broken English? Is it compelling? Maybe this is the year to hire a marketing copywriter who can improve your conversions and search engine results with their skilled writing.

Upgrade software, plug-ins, blog themes, forums software, and any back-end applications you use.  In the case of many of these, new things are being added all the time such as photo galleries and social networking tools.

The beginning of the New Year is the perfect time to re-evaluate why your web site exists and to inspect its performance.  Add it to your yearly list of rituals to help ensure your business and website is a success in the coming months.

Many businesses today realize the importance of SEO to their sites’ marketing strategy.  What many may not realize is that while traditional SEO is very important to a business’ marketing efforts increasingly businesses that would not typically be engaged in social media should be.  As social media becomes increasingly integrated with search, it’s time to add social media as a tool to all businesses’ SEO strategy.

Social SEO makes it easier for smaller businesses to compete with the big guys. A new site or startup would have a difficult if not impossible chance at ranking for highly competitive keywords.  Older sites have been at it too long to knock them off the top of the search engine results page without years of search engine campaigns.

Social factors now influence both paid search advertising and search engine optimization. Marketers are now able to demonstrate their social influence on paid search ads and organic search results by linking either Google+ (on Google) or Facebook (on Bing) accounts with their website.

Google recognizes that one personal endorsement from someone we know outranks endorsements from thousands of those we don’t. The same applies for a trusted authority.  Sharing a blogging link by a known expert carries more weight than something a casual user shares. A tweet that receives a viral-size number of re-tweets may have as much as an effect as a link from a high ranking site.  A Google +1 from a friend can send your site to the top of the social search engines’ results page for that friend’s entire network.

So with these thoughts in mind, all businesses should seek to ramp up their social strategies.  Be sure to put an emphasis on increasing followers and sharing content. Post your articles on social media and your products on Pinterest.  Lastly, add +1 buttons to anything & everything.

Pay-Per-Click advertising is available to anyone who wants to monetize their site or blog.  People buy advertising with a PPC company, like Google’s AdSense. The Pay-Per-Click company then lets webmasters and bloggers sign up for free accounts. The site owners get to choose the format for the PPC ads. The Pay-Per-Click company generates an ad code. The site owner places the code on their site and within a short amount of time the ads appear. Any time a visitor clicks on one of the ads, the advertiser pays the Pay-Per-Click company and the Pay-Per-Click then gives the site owner a portion of the profit.

Pay-Per-Click advertising can be an effective way of selling goods and services. If you’re aiming to build brand awareness or launch a new product, pay-per-impression advertising may be appropriate.

PPC advertising costs relate to the number of visitors your site receives, not the number of times that your ad is shown. This ‘pay-per-performance’ model also allows advertisements to be delivered only in certain geographical locations and only on sites with related content. The aim of this targeted traffic is to lead to not only a higher number of visitors to your site but to convert those visitors from browsers into buyers.

PPC providers allow you to set upper limits on your cost-per-click and total daily spend, meaning you only spend as much as you want. You can monitor the results of your campaign in real time and poor ad performance can be adjusted in light of the results achieved.

Pay-per-click advertising has a quick set-up and money spent can immediately translate into clicks through to your site. PPC advertising is a great companion to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns.  An SEO campaign can ultimately produce more visitors to a website, but the results may take time. If you need to generate online revenue immediately and have a business model which can support cost-effective PPC advertising, then a PPC campaign is a good complement to SEO as part of your internet marketing strategy.

Skillful implementation of Pay-Per-Click advertising is important to realizing the advantages of this marketing strategy.  Hiring an experienced PPC professional can really help make your Pay-Per-Click campaign successful.