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It’s that time of year again. Daffodils are sprouting, trees are budding, and crickets are chirping. Tax day is over. You did remember to pay your taxes, right?

Most people take advantage of the nicer weather to do some spring cleaning around the house. Your website is no different. Chances are after a hectic holiday season and the excitement of a new year, your site has developed a few cobwebs of its own. It’s time to air it out and get it ready for prime selling season.

Here are five simple ways to clean up your website to get it ready for spring.

Prune Dead Links

Scan your website for “dead links”. These are links to pages that no longer exist on your site and generally result in a visitor seeing an error page (a “404″ in web-speak). This can cause momentary confusion and a poor user experience.

You can find dead links on your site by looking at the “URL Not Found” report in Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t signed up for this service yet, you should do so immediately. Additionally, you (or your webmaster) can check your server logs to see which pages and files on your site are returning 404’s. Eric Lander has a great tutorial on log file analysis. Start there.

Sweep Away Outdated Content

Review all of the content on your website and ask yourself this question on every page:

Does this page help my visitors accomplish their task?

Many websites have old or outdated content that no longer serves the intended purpose. Perhaps it was part of a seasonal promotion or a landing page for a marketing event. Maybe some content been replaced or made obsolete by new pages.

Whatever the reason, take this chance to redirect those old pages to more relevant or timely pages on your site. Use a 301 “permanent” redirect so that search engines transfer the link equity of Page A to Page B. Or, simply freshen up the older content by re-writing or updating the references.

Analytics Check-Up

Is your site analytics package configured to track and report on conversions? Check to make sure that your tracking code is properly installed on all of your pages and that your goals are configured correctly to provide the right information in the right format. If you are using Google Analytics, start with the Help Section. If you have a paid analytics provider, look through their documentation for conversion tracking and reporting. Lastly, if you are still relying on basic log file analyzers, consider upgrading to a reporting suite that can at least track conversions.

How about your conversion rates themselves? Is there room for improvement over last year? Are you getting the info you need to make informed decisions? Think through how you want to measure your success this year and in this economy. Do you have all the right pieces in place to get the information you need?

Evaluate Processes and Personnel

Do you have the right people on your SEO team? Is SEO represented during the appropriate touch points in your strategic, creative, development, and launch processes? Check to make sure that your website team is including your optimization plan during their work cycles.

It’s too easy to prioritize SEO out of the tactical implementation of website updates, so use this spring cleaning as an opportunity to re-incorporate the SEO strategy into your daily operations. If you are planning a site redesign or transition to a new domain, a little pre-planning will insure that your transition goes smoothly.

Is anybody else seeing this extremely annoying gmail split screen? It only affects my Google Apps version of gmail, not my personal gmail account. I’ve tried everything: rebooting, clearing the cache and cookies, restarting Firefox. Nothing works, and it hasn’t gone away in 3 days.

Suggestions welcome.

Split Screen Gmail?

Just a heads up for the Ann Arbor crowd, the local Google office is putting on a show entitled “Using Google Applications in Various Marketing Strategies” tonight at the Kensington Court Hotel from 5:00 to 7:00.

Unfortunately I can’t make it tonight but I’m sure that’s okay with Google, considering the TechCrunch coverage my last post about the Google Apps presentation received.

Wondering when Google is FINALLY going to bless your Google Apps account with offline access to your Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations? Like most Google Apps for Your Domain users, I have been waiting (not so patiently) for the ability to download my documents to Google Gears to work offline in airplanes, subterranean offices, or other internet-challenged locations.

Unfortunately for Google Apps users, the rollout of offline access will occur after the rollout to regular non-Apps users:

We’ve sometimes delayed the launch of features like group chat and colored labels to Google Apps domains because we want to ensure that all the features we bring to the Google Apps suite are useful and stable before providing them to our business, education and organizational users.

However, as an administrator it is possible to opt-in to new services and features within Google Apps by configuring your domain settings like this:

1. Log in to the control panel at https://www.google.com/a/your_domain.com. Be sure to replace ‘your_domain.com’ with your actual domain name.
2. Click Domain settings.
3. Under the General tab, and in the New services and features section, check the box next to Turn on new features.
4. Click Save changes.

It may take up to 24 hours for the features to be added to your domain, but it beats waiting for the rest of the Apps world to catch up.

A few of the offline features and benefits are explained in this video from the Google Apps team:

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and a little too quiet on the blog front. Sorry about that. I was in Richmond last week for an extremely productive training session and on-site meeting with a client. I always enjoy heading back down south to get away from winter in Ann Arbor and visit friends and family, especially because the temperature topped 70 degrees for half the week.

While I was there I had the opportunity to give a presentation on Search Engine Marketing to the VCU Adcenter Brand Management class taught by Kelly Carson from DuPont. I teamed up with my former boss from CarMax and we set out to see if we could teach the students at the nation’s premier post-graduate advertising program a thing or two about SEM. It was like a reunion of sorts since all of us are veterans of The Martin Agency in Richmond, which both supports and benefits from the top-shelf school.

The challenge with this type of presentation is to balance higher-level marketing concepts with tactical information about Pay Per Clicks and Search Engine Optimization so that future Brand Managers will understand SEM’s capabilities when they are out in the real world of marketing and advertising. They probably won’t be the ones managing PPC campaigns or implementing SEO but they need to know how to work with the people that are.

Our presentation was a mix of internet marketing 101, SEM 101 and our experiences and results from years working on carmax.com SEO and PPC. I removed about 10 slides with carmax.com references and examples but the meat of the presentation is embedded here, thanks to Google Presentations. If anything seems incomplete or out of context, it’s probably because we voiced over most of the best stuff.

We were scheduled to speak for 90 minutes but ended up on stage for over 2 hours answering questions and drawing examples, charts and graphs on the whiteboard. The students seemed very engaged and asked extremely intelligent and targeted questions, all of which made us feel like they were picking up what we were laying down. I think this type of presentation is extremely valuable for marketers at every level. SEM is already a “must have” in any marketing plan and is on the verge of becoming a commodity service just like online media planning and buying is now. Don’t be surprised to see that theme explored in a future post.

You might be wondering what an advertising school looks like. Well, it looks a lot like an advertising agency. I didn’t have too much time to tour the entire building, but what I did see really impressed me. VCU just completed a new building for the Adcenter and it is very cool. Here are some highlights:

A giant poured concrete table in the cafeteria

A large open space with configurable ceilings, walls and furniture serves many purposes

A cool staircase is a space that used to be outdoors but is now a covered walkway

And of course, any ad agency needs table sports! This one is courtesy of Yahoo!