We are fast approaching the end of the year and for some of you, you only have a few days before you leave for the holidays. Before you rush off to gift giving and eggnogs, here are 5 things to do right now to make sure your web site is in good shape for 2008.

1) At the top of the list, check that darn copyright date! Nothing is more glaring than reading about all the rights you’ve reserved, last year. Make sure that the date either automatically updates itself (dynamically generated) or that someone in your organization adds 2008 to the date range the minute they get back into the office January 1st (yeah right). Yes, it may be a mere formality in most cases, but search engines do look for incongruent elements like these and factor them into their algorithms to determine your page rank and ultimately your search engine results placement. If they see your site is still claiming rights for 2007, they may penalize you over your competitor who’s got a brand new 2008 copyright declared.

2) While your you’re at it, check that privacy statement and terms of service. A year has passed and can you remember the last time you looked at the privacy statement? Probably not. Is it still congruent with your company policies? Does it reference services or products you no longer support or provide service for? Privacy statements and TOS’ seem to fall into the “create and forget” types of pages. However, considering that in the even of a dispute or issue, they may save you or your customers some heartache, you should really be periodically reviewing them. Every 6 months for information web sites (corporate web site), quarterly for ecommerce sites, and monthly for any innovative, user content generated web sites. Yes, that means reviewing them with your attorney if your fortunate enough to afford one.

3) Do you need update pricing? Now is as good as any to decide if you need to update your pricing or inventory. Look and see if there will be any increase in shipping costs in particular. 2008 is already shaping out to be a sketchy year so you might as well get ready now.

4) Look for any outdated or soon-to-be-dated content. Do you need to move anything into those “archives” like you did the year before? Do you need to setup any new 2008 areas of your web site? It is better to avoid creating directories with the date as part of the URI. Yes, my blog does say 2007 in each of the top posts. And yes, in this particular case, do as I say, not as I do. Again, search engines will automatically start to defer down dated content, particularly last year’s content. Don’t be surprised to see drop in your web stats, it’s part of the search engine year end clean up that happens. That leads us to #5.

5) Create and stage any new content for early 2008! After a week or two off for the holidays, you will likely have to take a little time to get back into the routine of updating your web sites. So get started now! Create a few draft articles for your blog and try to get the bulk of it done before you leave. Sure, you may want to write the proverbial “look back to 2007″ article, but its far more important to talk about what’s coming ahead in early 2008 than what happened in 2007. As far as SEO goes, nostalgia is always out, “new and improved” is always, always going to be in.

Happy holidays everyone! Thanks for making 2007 fantastic.

Ernesto Gluecksmann

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Show me how!, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.