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Has your company spent a big chunk of its budget on designing a new website with all the bells and whistles like flash, blogs, social networking, ecommerce, seo, web analytics and the lot and then fail to take advantage of it? This is quite so common among a lot of companies irrespective of size or type of business. Web sites that could easily become high traffic driver and subsequently, revenue generator, are simply left to waste away because no one can be bothered to track visitor activities, analyze trends or check for search engine compatibility and usability.

From my experience, I have discovered that these companies are merely keeping up appearances and investing heavily in Internet technology just for the simple reason that they need to be competitive. However, I believe it is not enough to just set up a web presence without given thoughts to search engine optimization, web usability and accessibility, and web analytics.

To see if your website has being set up to achieve its aims, run it through the following 10 point questions:

1. Is your site fully search engine optimized? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines? Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly? Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?
2. Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?
3. Do you use web analytics to track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided to improve your site?
4. Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?
5. Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further?
6. Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?
7. Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?
8. Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?
9. Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site’s link popularity score?
10. Do you use social networking to drive traffic to your site and improve your customer relationship?

These are the minimum requirements for a website to perform optimally in terms of traffic driving and conversion. You should be able to answer yes to all of these points/questions. Otherwise, you are really wasting the money that is being spent on your web presence and needs a rethink.