Checking website SEO basics regularly is all about the good stuff you can do to make your pages rank higher on search engines.
But for all the hard work put into raising the online profile of a website, webmasters let some SEO basic mistakes drag them down again.
Webmasters need to kick the tyres of the site every now and then to make sure nothing’s broken or about to fall off and cause ranking problems.
Here are a few places to start looking:
Keyword stuffing
The strategy is to cram a page full of keywords to spoof search engine rankings. The trouble is Google and the rest will spot the spoof and downgrade the site page ranking.
Revisit content to root out keyword stuffing.
Broken links
The road to nowhere is frustrating for web users trying to track information. Regularly check your site to eliminate broken links
Duplicate content
Not copied from other sites, but restated across your own on different pages. If the same keywords keep coming up, try an anchor page built around that keyword and cross-linking related pages.
Duplicate content confuses the search engine because the algorithm cannot work out which page should be rated
Repeated titles
Don’t repeat page titles and metatags across pages – think of a unique title for each. It’s the search engine confusion thing again if you keep repeating the same message. Go back to SEO basics and rethink your content strategy
Pointless links
Don’t link to low ranking, spammy sites. You need to punch above your weight. One link for a top ranking site is worth a lot more than hundreds of swapped links.
Keyword tags
These lists of keywords in the header are next to pointless for page ranking as search engines more or less ignore them. The main issue is keeping your keywords secret. List them in the metatag and your rivals will steal them for their own lists.
Don’t ignore web analytics
Regularly review your analytics to see what works and what doesn’t on your site – and use the data to make changes and then review again.
SEO basics: the right keywords
You need to know the words web users are typing into search engines to pull traffic to your site. Then, you need to include those keywords in you page content. The idea’s pretty simple, but too many marketers lose sight of the strategy.
Make your site robot friendly
SEO basics say if bots don’t crawl your site, then the pages won’t rank on Google and Bing. Search engines tell you what they want webmasters to do to get ranked. All you have to do is follow what they say.
Text links
Link keywords in the text to anchor pages of related material. Search engines read link text to get an idea of what a page is about.
The idea of this checklist is to show webmasters that SEO is an ongoing exercise, not just a one-off checklist to complete when a site is complete.
Every page should be checked to make sure the content and links comply with your in-house SEO basics strategy.
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