The New Year has just started and you’re making plans for the remainder of the year. So what are you going to do with your jewelry website? Here is the list of the top 10 things you should be doing to make the best use of your website.

1.) Hire a consultant to assess your website.
Instead of looking at your website and thinking about what you would like to do this year and possibly what you need to do, bring in an expert who can professionally assess your website and tell you where you need to make changes. As no two consultants will give you the exact same feedback, it’s a good idea to hire two consultants if you can afford to. If spending money on a consultant is not in the budget, or possibly you are a hands on person that feels that they can make changes that affect their website, proceed to the next steps. What will a professional assessment of your website cost? A flat $200 if you hire Websites for Jewelers. This includes a written formal proposal.

2.) Add Google Analytics to your website.
Google analytics will help you to determine important information with regards to who is visiting your website, whether they went directly to your website or used a search engine, if they used Google to find your website, which search term(s) they used, and so much more. How do you add Google Analytics to your website? If you don’t already have a Google account, go to www.google.com, click on the “sign in” link in the upper right corner, and then click the “Create an account now” link in the lower right corner. Once you create your account, Google makes several tools available to you including setting up your Google Analytics account.

3.) See where you stand in the search engines.
There are excellent programs that you can purchase and download to check this. If you want to get a very basic overview of where your website’s rankings in the major search engines, this is an excellent site to visit: http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/.

4.) Check your page title and Meta descriptions.
If you’re like most companies, you hired a web design firm to build your website. Unless the design firm specifically included an SEO (search engine optimization) package in the design of your website, the pages in your website may or may not have individual page titles and Meta descriptions. How do you check this? Go to all pages in your website (or at least a handful). In Internet Explorer, go to the top Internet Explorer and look for the link that reads “Page” and then “View Source”. When you click “View Source”, you will see the text that makes up your page. At the very top of the page you should see two things:
<title> </title>
<meta name="description" content=" ">

The information that appears with both of these should be unique. If you do not see unique text in the “title” tag, you will need to have unique text added to each page. If you do not see unique text added to the “meta description” tag, once again, you will need to have unique text added to each page.

5.) Make sure you have access to your website’s statistics and access this at least once a month.
Almost all websites have some type of website statistics program associated with it. Typically, your “hosting company” provides a link to this program so that you can check to see what’s going on in your website. These programs tell you, on a month by month basis, how many hits you had to your site, very importantly how many unique visitors visited your site, if your visitors used a search engine to find your site, which search engine did they use and which search term(s) did they use, and so much more. If nothing else, it’s important that you check your stats once a month to learn how many unique visitors are going to your website. This will tell you whether traffic to your website is going up, down or staying the same.

6.) Check for broken links, bad pages, and other issues in your website.
Even after you pay a web design firm to create a website, it’s always possible for there to be broken links, bad pages and other issues in your website. To check these things for yourself, you can use one of the many free tools available via other websites. Here is one tool that will quickly check for any web pages in your site that have problems: http://www.iwebtool.com/broken_link_checker. Please note that you should also try to use other tools as the site above does not check each page in depth for any problems.

7.) Look through your site for out of date content.This could include things as simple as the copyright date in the footer. It’s the new year and it’s time to update that copyright. More importantly, look through all pages in your site and see what information is no longer valid. Maybe you have added new manufacturers/designers to your line. Maybe you are no longer working with some manufacturers/designers. Check your “about us” page and see if the information is still valid. Possibly during this last year you were forced to lay off some people and you have a photo showing the people you laid off. It’s probably a good idea to place a new image there.

8.) Check the items (jewelry) you are showing and/or selling.
Have you kept the jewelry in your website up to date? Are you still showing items that were sold during last year? Take the time to go through your site to see which items are being displayed and make any adjustments that are necessary.

9.) Get into the habit of changing up the items that are pictured and featured on your home page.
No one likes to look at the same storefront every day. If you do not have a set of programming in your website that rotates the featured items on your home page, it’s very important for you to make sure that these items get manually updated on a regular basis. Show potential customers that you have new and exciting products to showcase.

10.) Give your website a fresh new look.
Retail stores need to change the displays in their windows and stores on a regular basis to keep people interested in shopping there. The same is true for websites. Your home page should have updated content on a regular basis so that people come back to it. At the very least, you should be updating text on your home page and tell people about what’s new and interesting. If you can, it’s always a great idea to change up the design of your website once a year. If you haven’t updated the look of your website for two years, it’s important that you make a commitment to giving your site a new look.