The recent panacea around social media can easily distract from the fundamentals of properly managing your web presence. If your website was built by a summer student in the summer of 1999, you have bigger problems than not having a social media strategy. It’s time to get back to basics.

As a starting point: make sure you understand your audiences. What are they coming to your website to do? If you don’t know, do some research to find out. The job of your website is to assist users in meeting their transactional goals. If they’re successful, you will profit as a result.

Here are a few basic things to look at:

• How well is your home page performing? Is it clear what you do? How does it compare to your competitors? Does it promote key content and applications?
• Does the design look current or dated? Ensure the esthetic of your site isn’t a detriment to the credibility of your brand.
• Take a hard look at your content. If it’s all long-form text it’s probably time to change things up. Take full advantage of the opportunities available and make an investment in audio and video content.
• How about interactivity? Can I actually do anything on your website? Interactive applications that support user goals are well worth the investment.
• Is your site optimized for organic search engine placement against a specific set of keywords? At an absolute minimum, you should be easily located with your name and city. Search engine optimization is something that requires ongoing efforts to build and maintain but it’s remarkable how many site managers expect results on keywords that rarely appear on their site.

Start with the fundamentals and master them. When you’ve gotten your website performing at its potential, that’s a much better time to get into establishing a presence on the social media du jour. In the meantime, keep an eye on what’s being said about your brand online and make sure to claim usernames for your brand on emerging sites so they’re ready when you are.