As we continue to audit websites for our prospective and current clients, we have found five things a website needs to fix to be relevant in 2013 as mobile and search become more important.

Open site Architecture.

We constantly are amazed when we look at a site and see that it cannot be accessed by search engines and people wonder why they don’t rank in Google. Every site should be seamless to Google and set up to have good SEO on the backend with Page Titles, H1 Tags, URL structures and Alt Tags, so both Google and people on your site are able to find things easily.

Better Hosting.

People tend to be penny wise and pound foolish when it comes to hosting. Too often, we see sites hosted on GoDaddys out of Arizona when there actual business is located in New Jersey. Not only do they lose the local search potential, but they typically have slow sites. Slow sites cause people to give up on the site and abandon what they were doing, which may be buying something. Getting a faster server can lead to a fast website with better conversion pages, more sharing, more links, happy users and a higher search ranking. This is money well spent. We absolutely love Linode for our own site and our clients.

Social Media.

Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are three of the best referrers of website traffic on the Internet. They serve millions of people every day; and moreover give every organization big and small a chance to be part of that audience. Every business should be on Facebook and Twitter. Every business to consumer needs a Pinterest account and every business to business needs to use LinkedIn. Once each profile is set up, it’s important to ensure they are updated daily with links back to the site. Too often we go onto someone’s Facebook page and find no links back to the website.

Analytics.

Google analytics is still one of the best resources people can use to measure their site’s traffic and stats, but too often we see people focused on visits when they should be looking at bounce rate, time on site, site speed and funnel conversion to understand where their site can be improved. Further, people need to see what’s working, are you getting sales from articles people are writing about you? or AdWords? or Social Media? Monitoring you analytics will tell you what’s working and what’s not..

Responsive Design.

The age of the smartphone as arrived and with new form factors coming out like the iPad mini, it’s important for sites to render effectively on mobile and tablet devices without causing additional overhead.

Every site can benefit from the above items to stay ahead or overtake their competition. Now, making it happen sounds like a great New Year’s resolution for 2013.