SEO Housecleaning Tips

SEO Housecleaning Tips and Tricks for 2017

When’s the last time you spent any considerable effort rebooting your website’s SEO? Whether you have an ongoing SEO campaign or had your site’s search engine effectiveness optimized once and promptly forgot about it, 2017 is the year you “clean house” with your on-site SEO.

Much like your house, your site’s SEO properties don’t get ‘dirty’ all at once. Things build up, become cluttered, and eventually need a thorough deep-cleaning. When you need your home’s carpet cleaned you call The Carpet Cleaning Company ; when you need to overhaul your site’s SEO, you call ClickReady Marketing an SEO Marketing Agency. Until then, here are a few things you can do to tidy up your site’s search engine optimization properties that will set you up for a searchable, crawlable 2017.

When you go to your site (or internal pages on your site), does it seem slow to load? Check to see if programs like Java or Flash are running and also with your server. A free resource like GTMETRIX can help you accurately measure your site pages’ load times.

Are your title tags and meta data optimized? Be sure they say the right things about the right pages; recent tests have shown these two elements to be some of the most critical for successful onsite SEO.

Do you have enough internal links on your website? Search engines want help learning what your site is all about, and internal links are made for this purpose. Make sure all your internal links work, are attached to good keywords, and go to the right pages.

Do you have any broken links on your site? Click through every single link on your site – yes, even to those that go outside your site – and make sure you’re not getting an 301s or 404s. Broken links are bad for SEO and bad for user experience.

Duplicate content is the scourge of your site’s SEO. Crawl your site for duplications and apply crawl directives from google or use robots.txt to tell search engines the specific folders to search for your content.

If you’re using a host like WordPress or Squarespace, you may be able to easily “optimize” your site for mobile use. If you don’t know how to do this, bring in a pro to make sure you don’t inadvertently mess up the desktop version of your site.

Are your beautiful images tagged with HTML and/or CSS notations? If you’re not telling Google what your images are, the assumption becomes that they’re all the same.

If your business has moved at any point in the last couple of decades, Google may still be associating it with the wrong address. Do a search for your business name and comb through the results for any mention of your old address. Find one? Be sure the address on your site is updated and create a free Google Business Listing  to communicate to the search giant that you moved.