Your basic website was built two years ago. It drives enough traffic to make the effort of upkeep worthwhile and acts as a handy reference guide for your customers and sometimes for your staff. Having optimized and maintained your website by working on the titles, tags, content and links, you have achieved relatively good search engine rankings.

You are mostly satisfied with your online accomplishments but sense there is something more you could be doing to improve your website's marketing potential. It's probably a small thing or two you could do and it's been nagging at you for weeks but with the chaos of the holidays and New Year period, you just haven't found the time to do them.

Here are three things you can do quickly to increase the search engine marketing potential of your website.

1/ Sign up for social media. Get involved with colleagues and communities found at Linked In, Flickr, MySpace or some other such social network. It only takes a few minutes to sign-up and establish an account. Adding to your profile can take an hour or two at the beginning but will take less time as time goes on.

The benefits from being involved in social communities are two fold. You can research, contact and collaborate with others in your field quickly and easily. You can also use your profile to promote your business.

2/ Provide more contact and address information. There are two primary places contact information is expresse

d on most websites. The first is the obvious contact us page and the second is in the footer section found on most sites. Adding more information to both places is beneficial for search placements and for site visitors. Detailed contact information is especially useful for placements in local search engines.

The contact us page should offer as much information as possible, including full street addresses with postal or zip codes. It should also include a map from Yahoo, Google, Ask or MSN. The footer section of each page should, if applicable, provide full postal and telephone contact information including zip, postal and area codes.

3/ Perform a gentle audit of the website. This should be done at least four times a year. Go through the site and make notes of all the little things that require changing. You are most likely looking for minor alterations, not a full scale redevelopment.

Does your website say all the things you want it to say? Is there any information or references that could be updated? Do all links lead to active pages or sites? Are the staff or executive bios up to date?

Ensuring your site is updated is obviously important and making minor changes and information updates to a website is almost always a good thing to do. Most of these changes would take mere minutes to make but present a better, fresher set of documents to site visitors and search spiders.

If you can spare an hour or less for the next three days, by Friday evening you can have a stronger web presence without expending a lot of precious post-holiday energy.