Search Engine Optimization Maintenance
Search Engine Optimization is never a once and done type of activity. If you are serious about your website’s health and success, SEO needs to be an ongoing activity. Once you or a professional SEO Consultant has performed the initial site optimization, your goal is to continually improve your website. Load times, fresh content, geo tagging, the list goes on and on.
Lets look at a few housekeeping basics as it pertains to SEO on your site-
1. Maintenance of Metadata
SEO can be a game of inches! The inches we are talking about is the space on the search page from the bottom to the top. Consistently monitoring your meta tags and descriptions is key. Are you performing searches for your website? Are you seeing what keywords are missing from your site? Are you counting character length in your titles and descriptions?
2. 404 Errors
This should be an obvious answer. Make sure your site runs smoothly and loads quickly. Do you have missing pages? Broken links? Are your internal links correct? Today, many customers who visit your site have a very short attention span. Coming across one or two missing pages or 404 messages is a sure way to send them back to a search page and leave your site all together.
3. Edit Internal Links
Delete any link on your website that does not bring your visitor to relevant and interesting information. A deep network of links on your website is vital for organizing information, reviving old pages or posts, and keeping customers on your site longer. However, too many links or links directing to non-relevant information can be confusing to visitors.
4. Get Rid Of Bad Links
If you site is more than a few years old you probably have links that are not relevant anymore, ineffective, or actually spam or low authority now. Remember, linking to outside content is just like giving a personal referral to the website you are sending your visitors to. Ask yourself this question with every item, or piece of content you link to; would I send my Mom or Daughter there?
5. Content Scrubbing
Once again, if your site has been up for a year or two or more, now would be a good time to adjust, edit, and “scrub” your content and pages. What was good SEO practices two years ago may not be great today with the new search algorithms. Is your content written for a real person to read or for a search engine to crawl? Today, both Bing and Google want your site to be in “plain text”; how people actually speak and talk. Keyword stuffing can actually hinder your ranking and loading up blog post and pages with random text can take away its authority rank from search engine. Meaning your sites information is considered untrustworthy or unreliable. Go back and review your content for readability!
A lot of work and activities go into having your website rank high in search results. Just remember, that is not the only goal. You want your site to be easily found by people who are looking for the info, products, and services you have to offer.
Ready to take your website to the next level?
If you have a local business or your business serves a geographical area, we can help you! Coastal Marketing Strategies specializes in Local and Organic SEO. We are local, hands-on, and serious about your website. Call us today at 843-473-3680 or contact Coastal Marketing Strategies today here.
