Start off the new year with a change

It's that time of the year again to dust off your old websites and make them shine again. There are several things that you can do to make sure your site stays at the top of the list. Without these preventive measures your site will eventually drop its ranking. I recommend that you do the following more often than once a year, but its never to late to begin.

1. Update Content and add new content to your website - It never hurts to add or update content on your website. In fact, in almost all cases it will only help. Add a few new pages in about a new product. Spice up your about us page because you have recently merged with a company, in addition to editing the years in business because you have edited your website.
2. Update your copyright notices and other time marked stamps- Google and other search engines like to see new content and easy way to tell it hasn't been updated is by looking at the timestamps. Make sure these are up to date with your edits.
3. Submit your sites to directories and search engines - If your site hasn't been around much this is vital. Even older sites can benefit from this by getting there site out there more. It can never hurt to resubmit your site. The only time it hurts is if you want to get listed in DMOZ. This is because it actually resets your place in line.
4. HTML Validation - Make sure your site is up to date on the new standards for HTML. If you know that your old website has tables still being used everywhere and the word CSS does not show up anymore, it is the year to finally change your site. Convert all your sites to use Cascade Style Sheets and try to avoid using tables. I still believe that tables are still acceptable to use for tabular data. That is data that should be represented in a table, for instance statistics.  Also everywhere more and more HTML tags are becoming deprecated. Eventually the <font></font> tag will no longer work on most web browsers. It is time to remove this tag and many others.
5. Spam prevention and Cleanup - It's time to stop those spammers from bombarding your forums, comment sections and email with spam messages. Turn off your catchall email addresses and add captchas. Catchall email address, catch all email address (joe@example.com, joe1@example.com, joe3@example.com, etc) and direct it to a single address. Than a spammer randomly sends a message to support@example.com and it gets directed to you. If you turn off catchall you'll most likely get rid of most of these emails. Also, use a captcha in your forms. A captcha is a validation to make sure the user is indeed a human and not a robot. Most spammers are lazy and use robots to search and submit there forums. Fix those forums, and forms for emails.

This is the year to fix all of the things you have been putting off regarding your website. Why put it off another day or year. Everyday you put it off is another missed sale, or a missed advertisement. Don't hurt yourself anymore and put a couple hours to your site for the next few days. You are sure to improve your websites performances for both your new and old clients, in addition to the robots searching your website. Good luck and may the new year bring you increased website hits.