I live on the balmy west coast of Canada, which I can tell you is not balmy right now. We have had almost 3 feet of snow in the last few days and more to come. What does this have to do with “look­ing for­ward to 2009″? Well, as I looked at the claus­tro­pho­bic snow pil­ing up I real­ized that in all things it is time to do more with less.

So for 2009:

— take a look at your web­site and see what pages may not be work­ing any longer. Maybe it is time to redi­rect them to a page on your site that you can cover the same topic(s) and not just bulk up your site.

- take a look at your con­tent, espe­cially the index page. When was the last time you changed the con­tent? Is your con­tent outdated?

- take a look at the key­words / key phrases that you are using. Are they rel­e­vant for today’s mar­ket? Are there more keywords/phrases then you need — prob­a­bly more tar­geted words will work better?

- take a look at your link­ing. Are there links that no longer work for your site? Are there links that no longer work period?

- take a look at your visual web design. This may be listed last but cer­tainly not least! When was the last time you updated your web­site (2–4– or more years?) Are vis­i­tors com­ing in and see­ing the same-old-same-old?

Look ahead to 2009. It is a new start and you can do more with less and suc­ceed — YES YOU CAN!!

Jan

I read a great arti­cle at Web Pro News called “Is Bounce Rate a Google Rank­ing Fac­tor?” by Chris Crum. Here are a few points.

Pay atten­tion to Bounce Rates. Maybe the page con­tent is not good or maybe the key­words in the con­tent are not good.

Ana­lyt­ics eval­u­a­tion tips

1. Set up goals

2. Pay atten­tion to the Geo­graphic stats.

3. Pay atten­tion to what vis­i­tors are typ­ing in to find you (they are say­ing here’s what I want to find).

This arti­cle also has a video on per­son­al­ized (sub­jec­tive) search results. This is very inter­est­ing and well worth the few min­utes to watch. Briefly Google search is deter­min­ing what you are look­ing for based on what you pre­vi­ously searched for.

Read more about these here.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/21/is-bounce-rate-a-google-ranking-factor

Matt Cutts has a post on his blog about an update on their web­mas­ter tools that will be very help­ful for folks who work web sites and for folks work­ing their own site.

Before I send you off to his blog to read about this I have to tell you that this infor­ma­tion helped me to find some issues with my site that I did not real­ize were issues. So, if you do not deal with this directly have your web mas­ter check it out for you — it is worth it.

Here’s Matt

A brief from his blog:

“I can’t believe a new fea­ture from Google isn’t get­ting more notice, because it con­verts already-existing links to your site into much higher qual­ity links, for free.

When some­one comes to your site’s web­server and asks for a page that doesn’t exist , most web servers are con­fig­ured to return an HTTP sta­tus code of 404, which means that the page was “Not Found.” If some­one links to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, most web­servers give a pretty sucky expe­ri­ence: vis­i­tors usu­ally land on a pretty use­less page, and search engines might not give you full credit for those 404 errors. ”

Read more here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/free-direct-text-links/

I just touched on this briefly today so will get back to you.

Jan