• Do you find yourself apologizing for your website when you send someone to it? (“Just ignore the pictures/flashy thing/out-of-date stuff.”)
• Do you feel like the site could actually motivate more people to call or buy?
• Does it just seem like the site feels a little dated or out-of-step with what you see on the Internet these days? Or, it doesn’t even mention your current services or product lines?

Whether you update content on your website frequently or just every so often, a regular—perhaps deeper—review could improve search engine results (which means bringing new eyeballs to your info) and make sure the site is technically up to snuff.

You don’t necessarily have to scrap the whole website to get some added benefits. Even a few tweaks can bring real results. For instructor Arlene Faulk, we improved her page rank in Google and delivered more inquiries and students simply by changing the words “t’ai ch” with an apostrophe to “tai chi” (without) on her website along with some other minor copy updates. Renaming page files with search friendly words, converting image-based navigation terms to HTML text or rewriting content on key landing pages just might give your business the bump it needs.

Your website check-up might point to some of these action steps (depending in part on when the site was built and the techy chops of your website designer/developer):

• Streamline the underlying code to make sure the website functions well on all popular browsers.
• Update copy and images to tell people exactly how your products or services will help them.
• Experiment with new keyword phrases in the copy, page titles and file names to match what real people are typing into search engines.
• Rethink (and probably remove) flash-based opening pages.
• Add alt tags* and restructure content to meet standards for the disabled and for mobile devices.

Of course, a full redesign may be necessary at some point. Web standards (including the explosion of Internet access on mobile devices) are continually being refined to help us deliver information more efficiently. Don’t let your website stagnate!

*alt tag = A bit of code that says what an element or image is even when it isn’t being displayed. For example, a visually-impaired person using a screen reader would hear the text of the alt tag in place of seeing the image.