Applying Your Knowledge to 2010

Now it’s time to take what you learned in 2009 and put it into action!

If you used any sort of tools (hit counters, analytics, keyword generators) in 2009, you have to have learned a few things. If you have any sort of seasonal slump, you know it now. You should have learned which pages on your site were high functioning, and which were a waste of space.

In short, you should now know what did and didn’t work, and hopefully have an idea of why.

This is great! It means you are positioned for 2010 – if you use your head. The main mistake a lot of website managers make in the new year is resolving to ‘do it right’ this year – then rushing off and finding a whole new way to ‘do it right’ and completely ignoring everything they learned the year before.

For example, let’s say that you noticed that a lot of the links you got in 2009 haven’t helped you. Instead of figuring out which ones are useless and why, you rush out and sign up for a service that offers you x number of links in x days.

If you really looked at your situation, however, you’d see that a lot of the sites you linked from had little or no Page Rank – so what you need to do now is concentrate on link building from sites with good PR. Does your new service offer THAT?  If not, find one that does.

Same goes for content. If you notice that all your pages that were constructed for 50 cents a page by a cheap outsource freelancer have a really high bounce rate, maybe you nee to consider hiring better writers – even if they cost a bit more. Hiring the same cheap SEO keyword stuffing writers might get you cheap traffic, but your conversion rate will likely be nil. Using an SEO service that produces quality content and will stand behind their work is a good option.

In other words, sure – look for new outlets and ways to get things accomplished – but don’t ignore what you learned already! Make 2010 better than 2009 by applying your knowledge to your new efforts.