A new year always brings about new possibilities, which are often predicated on the many resolutions we all make to improve our lives and work during the course of the year.

It’s possible that many of the hardworking webmasters and website owners have resolved to improve or amp up their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts this year to help them find more relevant consumers and increase conversions. However, many of these same Web workers will quickly find themselves faced with the same problems that plagued them in the years passed, most notably a lack of time in an already busy schedule.

No need to worry, though, because here’s some good news for you: It’s possible to maintain a healthy SEO campaign by (mostly) conducting a check up once a week that examines the most important elements of your website for moving up the search engine rankings, allowing you to identify and correct any issues you may be having. And the best part is, once these larger problems are corrected, it will help improve many other aspects of your overall SEO performance.

Just make sure that you regularly follow a version of this SEO checklist once a week, and get ready to watch the inevitable upward progress of your search marketing efforts.

To start, simply sign into your Google Webmaster Tools account (actually, if you don’t have one, the first step is to register one), which can help you quickly identify any issues with your domain. Primarily, you should use this service to make sure your sitemaps don’t have any errors and to review how many of your pages have been indexed. If you find that you have some missing pages, that’s a pretty good indicator that you need to submit a brand new sitemap.xml to the search engines.

Google Webmaster Tools can also help you spot any crawl errors (pages “not found” or broken links) on your site; if these issues are uncovered, they should be considered top priority fixes. In addition, this tool can help you check up on your site speed, HTML problems, such as short or duplicate metadata, and links to your site.

Having a bunch of dead links on your website is going to hurt your standing with the search engines, so you should make it a point to regularly look for them by using a tools like Dead-Links.com to crawl your website and point out any hazardous hyperlinks that you are unaware of. And once you know which links are bad, you can easily fix or get rid of them.

If you’ve put any effort into your SEO until now, every page on your site should have its own unique, descriptive title (as indicated in the HTML