We all know that there is no quick solution to fully search engine optimizing your site. These things take time, persistence and a constant ear to the ground for algorithm changes. As long as you have the resources they are worthwhile though, with a successfully optimized site reaping the rewards of being at the summit of your field’s search rankings.
Even if you don’t have the time or resources you would ideally like to dedicate to your SEO efforts there are a few quick alterations to your site you will potentially improve your rankings or at least bring in some extra traffic to your site.
Are you on the List?
Making sure that your site is listed with the major search engines is a must. As is taking advantage of any additional service they offer. If you are based in an office or a shop are you listed on Google Maps? Are you listed with directory sites? Have you signed up for a Facebook page?
Not all of these additional profiles will apply to you or your circumstances, but they do provide additional methods of finding you online as well as giving you some important links back to your site.
Update Your Content
By checking your contents vital statistics in Google Analytics, looking particularly at Click Through Rates and Bounce Rates, you can go about making a few subtle changes which should improve their performance.
Freshening up a page’s meta description and title could make it more appealing to users, while adding internal links to high performing pages to related lower performing content (and vice versa) will lead users to more potentially interesting articles on your site, reducing the bounce rate.
Robots.txt
This small file that sits on your server with your website is responsible for telling search bots where they can and can’t go. Excluding broken or low quality pages can be good for your site’s ranking, but checking to see if there is any search worthy content excluded for search is even more important. These things do happen so checking through what is listed is a must. Don’t be put off by the way things are formatted if it’s your first time using them, guides such as this SEO Book Robots.txt tutorial are there to hold your hand so you know what to look out for.
There can be Only One!
You are marked down for duplicate page elements by search algorithms, so minimizing and preventing them is very important. By using Google’s very own Webmaster Tools you can scan your site for duplicate pages, keywords and poor titles. Once you have flagged them up it is best to make the alterations and redirects to show that you site is not full of duplicate content.
Redirects
Dead links are poor form in the eyes of the search engine bot, so minimizing them is very important. This applies to external links to your content which is no longer live and the best way to find them is through using a tool such as Xenu’s Link Sleuth you can easily scan and fix any 404 errors you may encounter.
It also gives you an opportunity to think about the keywords you are using for each page: are they relevant? How highly contested are they? Is it a phrase that your audience would naturally search for?
This article was written by Ken Allen as an entry to SEO Training company Silicon Beach Training’s SEO Trumps Blogging Competition.
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Tags: maintenance, meta tags, search engine optimization, SEO, seo tips, web content