The New Year is no better time to prepare your site for the year ahead. Unfortunately, more often than not, organizations don’t update their site on a regular basis. Refreshing your content can contribute to improved ranking and exposure in Google.

Follow this list to make sure your site is in ship-shape condition for 2009:
1. Change the copyright date at the bottom of your site to 2009;
2. Edit your home page copy. Your message should be mindful of today’s economy. Speak to your visitors to demonstrate your understand of the current challenges your target marketing facing.
3. Update your news and blog articles. A 2009 date will demonstrate that you’re on the ball.
4. Take a look at your Page Titles and Meta Data. As your content changes, don’t forget to change your keywords and page titles.
5. Give your inquiry form or linked email addresses a quick test. Make sure they are going to the correct destination and you know who in your organization is getting the leads and queries.

Recently I was at a networking event and asked a person I had just met if they were proud of their web site. She said to me “Oh, we’re working with someone, but we’ve been working on it for about a year”. I thought to myself “a year?”. One full year of missed opportunities. Let me try to actually break down the cost of this loss in terms of dollar and cents.

Let’s say for example your existing web site generates 50 visitors a day. I will add that by not updating your site through the years and bringing it up to today’s standards you will find that your traffic will continually decrease over time. Now you look into a crystal ball and estimate the performance of a new site. The new site would be more visually appealing, search engine friendly content, compliant with WC3 standards, and contain relevant content that will increase your traffic by 100%. This is a totally realistic number. Now you have 50 more visitors per day or approximately 1,500 visitors per month or 18,000 visitors per year. If those numbers don’t motivate you to do something the next set of numbers should. Now we’ll turn traffic in dollars and cents.

Let’s say you decide not to invest in a new web site, but instead try your hand a PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising, the most popular being Google Adwords. When you set-up an Adwords account you will use the keyword tools to find out how much you need to spend per day and per click to be in the top six positions. Depending upon the competitiveness of your business you’ll get a sense of what those clicks to your web site will actually cost. For a B-to-B marketer a cost of $1.25 per click is a reasonable number. In using this as an example here is the actually cost to you by doing nothing. Not to mention you are giving this traffic to your competitors.

*Calculated by assuming the cost per visitor in the Adwords campaign is $1.25 click.

In conclusion, you can see the true value of traffic. A good analogy? A large billboard on Route 3 just before the Lincoln Tunnel. In Case #1 your billboard is blank. In Case #2 you billboard cost you $1,875 per month or $22,000 per year. In Case #3 the cost is equal to the redesign of your web site and your billboard stays up forever. I rest my case.