The truth is that if a Web designer/friend with a keen eye hadn’t picked apart the old design and made me realize that while the site was good, it wasn’t completely functional, I would have kept it the same. I was so closely tied to my site that I didn’t recognize that it could be better.

Take a close look at your Web site and ask yourself a few questions.

• Is your site getting long in the tooth and no longer reflecting what your company stands for? Just as very few people will tell you when you have food in your teeth, unless you ask, no one will tell you that you should update or change your site. My friends do tell me when I have food in my teeth so my site should be in good shape for years!

• What impression does your site give? That’s important to know when someone wants to find out more about your business, or when he or she searches for a business that fits your keywords. Your site is your link to the outside world. It says, “Here we are…here’s what we offer…and here’s why you should work with/buy from us.”

• Make sure your site is up to date. If it’s October and your last blog post was in January, visitors will quit stopping by because there’s no new information. If you made a big deal about holding a winter sale and the banner on your site is still up in April, your clients and prospects will be scratching their heads trying to figure that one out.

• Are you having fun with your site? Add photos and videos. Let visitors get a sense of who you are and what you can do for others. I think some of us bonded over the video of me in my monkey pajamas.

Updating your Web site could be the first step to moving your business forward. It could help you clarify where you want to go and where you want your business to be years from now.

This is an excerpt from my FREE e-book, “How to Get Your Home-Based Business Out of a Rut.” Click here to get this e-book, a free chapter from my 5^th book, Working Naked, and various tips and updates.

Related articles:

5 things you need to know about your small business Web site

You CAN get the Web site you want

If you’re serious about business, you need a Web site

In “11 Reasons Customers Don’t Trust Your Web Site,” writer Lisa Barone shares common sense tips and easy-to-stop-doing strategies for making your site better.It’s more of a list of Web site mistakes you may be making including:

• It’s littered with typos. Do your best to find typos and squash them dead. It’s hard to believe what someone has written when every other word is spelled wrong. Also, it looks bad if your phone number is wrong. My number changed recently but I didn’t change it on my site until last week. (Oprah, if you tried to call before, try again!)

• You don’t say why you’re different. Guilty as charged. This is one of the points I hadn’t considered but will be changing shortly. No matter what type of expertise you have, there has to be something that sets you apart from your competitors. Highlight that difference on your site.

• It’s hard to navigate. If I’m struggling to find your Product pages, than your site must be for people way smarter than me. I’ll go elsewhere. When you’re closely tied to your company, product and site, you may not realize how easy your site is to navigate. Do an informal survey with business associates whose opinions you trust and make any changes to make it easier for visitors to find the information they need.

• There’s no About page. Help people trust your Web site by telling them about yourself, why you do what you do, how long you’ve been doing it, and by introducing to the people who run your store. Include a photo so people can attach a name to a face.

The beauty of a Web site is that you can make changes whenever you want. Finding the time to make those changes though, can be the challenge.

Darren Rowse, the Australian guy behind ProBlogger, admits that at least 5 times in the past 7 years, his ranking has dropped significantly.  Rather than cry into your keyboard (and who hasn’t), he offers several tips for getting back on track.

1. The key is not to make massive big changes to your site’s SEO too quickly or as a gut reaction to a change in your ranking.

2.  If the traffic doesn’t come back after an extended period you might want to get some expert SEO advice and make some larger changes.

3. Have you done anything Black Hat?…If you are caught breaking the rules by Google you’re likely to be penalized.  If this is the case for you, you have two choices:

* fix what you did that was wrong and ask for a reconsideration into the index

* keep doing what you’re doing and suffer the consequences

Rowse’s experience as a blogger and someone who’s familiar with Google rankings makes these tips even more valuable.  His final solution for dealing with wobbly rankings: don’t rely on the rankings so much. Good advice.

How they work
After you understand the difference between SEO and SEM, you can put them to work. The article “10 Practical Small Business SEO and SEM Marketing Tips“ gives suggestions for making your SEO and SEM efforts count. Two of my favorite tips are #5. Pay attention to landing pages10 (you don’t have to send visitors to your home page) and #10. Stay True To Your Business. Write for your audience, not for search engines. You don’t need to implement all ten tips but you’ll find some good info you can use right away. Isn’t that the best kind?