Tis the season for website housekeeping
Ahhhh… Christmas. The time of year is meant for sharing and caring. Also, a time for reflection and looking forward to the new one ahead. The New Year of the Gregorian 
calendar falls on the 1st of January, which is a relatively recent development. Until 1751 in England and Wales (and all British dominions) the New Year started on the 25th March…. just a cheeky little fact for you!
New Year is an event that conjures up in most of us a feeling of ‘out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new’ in varying degrees of urgency. We feel the same and are big fans of sites having a freshen-up (as are the Search engines)!
With this in mind, here are a few housekeeping checks to consider when looking at your site to prepare it for the Fresh New Year of 2013.
1) Content review.
Check that all content on pages are up-to-date and cohesive. For sprawling websites with lots of pages, this can be a time-consuming task and if when doing it, you get bogged down yourself in the content, consider consolidating some of the information. Ask yourself truthfully if any pages repeat themselves and can be tidied up.
2) Integration with the practice
It’s a great time to think about your practices objectives and its goals for the year. Use this period to ensure that what is offered in the practice is offered on your site and vice versa. Treatments that you no longer offer will need removing from the site, or ones which you are finding really popular in the practice may do better with a greater online presence, through promotion or more SEO attention.
3) Compliancy
The CQC and GDC have a number of compliances for websites, which we at Dental Design are on top of and will make you aware of when they arise. Whilst we try ensuring all our sites adhere to these, have a check to see you have details of a complaints procedure on the site, also GDC numbers for all dental professionals practicing. For more on this, check out the GDC’s Principles of Ethical Advertising.
4) Keywords
We endeavour to maintain keyword relevance for your online marketing in order to optimise the site as part of our on-going SEO management packages. If there is a new focus for the practice, such as sedation, child dentistry, or you find a local town is more populated and has potential patients, then let us know. We can work with you to achieve a keyword strategy which enables your site is optimised for viewing by your target audience.
At our end, we employ various SEO tools to constantly work on your site. Nonetheless there are housekeeping tasks to employ in preparation for the New Year. These include checking on-page optimisation by;
- Checking tags are well written and reflect the pages content.
- Going through any missing titles and particular descriptions to ensure these are correct.
- Ensure image names are optimised and work well within the page.
- Ensure empty pages get filled to ensure ‘bot’s can happily crawl the site and therefore rank.
- Run tests for errors on the site using our webmaster tools
If over the festive period (and after a deserved rest), you would like to review the site, then go through this check list and get in touch for any further advice. We will of course be on hand to implement any changes for you. Give us a call in the New Year to ensure your site is ready for 2013.
Wishing you a Happy Christmas and joyous New Year from all of us at Dental Design.
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