In December, Americans watched 33 billion online videos. Not participating in YouTube or advertising on Hulu yet? It may be time to consider it.

While there are more than four steps to most quality assurance efforts and definitely more than four things that could go wrong with your website and content, today we’d like to share four ways you can help ensure that your website, once launched, is living up to a high standard of quality and not making simple mistakes that could be avoided.

4 Ways to Ensure Website Quality

1. Confirm your contact info. Every time you have contact info on a page (maybe it’s on your homepage, in your footer, on the contact us page), you should be double checking to make sure that your phone number, address, contact person, etc. are all absolutely correct.
2. Check for broken links. Go through your website (preferably before launch) and click on every link. Yes, I mean every one. In doing this, you’re making sure that A. your link isn’t broken, B. your link is going to the correct website and C. if applicable, your link is opening in a new window or tab on the browser.
3. Have more than one person read the copy. It’s easy to look over your own mistakes and miss a few, but having a second pair of eyes on the content of your website can identify those missed mistakes. Especially if those second eyes are the eyes of a copywriter or copyeditor. If you can’t hire a professional copywriter to write your whole website, the next best thing is to have them edit what you write. It saves you money and can still ensure a quality, error-free product.
4. Go searching for inconsistencies. The best way to do this is to come up with a style guide up front. A style guide is a document (Word, PDF, etc.) that tells you and anyone else working on the website what consistent rules to follow. It may specify the size of images, the placement of contact info, the colors of your text or the way you are going to write (for example: there’s the Oxford Comma. This is the comma that comes before the “and” in a list of three or more items such as Red, Blue, and White. This comma is optional and you can also write your sentence Red, Blue and White, but you should make sure you choose to either always use it or always not use it throughout your site). Once you have your style guide, it becomes simpler to go page by page through the site and watch for inconsistencies in color, font, style, images, etc. And easier to make your site more professional, clean and user-friendly.

For our real estate clients, this nice, little article offers you some great ways to evaluate how your website is performing. For example: did you know that “73 percent of sellers would hire an agent who uses video?”

14 Ways to Optimize Your Site For Real Estate Buyers:

1. Make sure you have a personal site (not just a broker page).
2. Move your picture.
3. Put your contact info on the front page.
4. Make sure you’re up-to-date.
5. Link to your listings.
6. Have a URL for your niche market.
7. Capture your leads.
8. Post at least 20 pictures of your listing.
9. Link to your blog and social media accounts.
10. Take some video.
11. Link to community information.
12. Offer a mortgage calculator.
13. Make those who contact you feel safe.
14. Feature past client testimonials.

Read on.

Check out Mashable’s recent article on online productivity.

Yahoo! offers a free tool that allows you to improve your website’s performance by discovering what is slowing it down. Click here to visit their website and learn more.