http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2013/01/09/once-a-week-seo-checklist.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter
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.
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to check sitemaps
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.
- Don’t forget to look for crawl errors, too
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.
- Look for (and fix) broken links
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.
- Tune up title tags
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
tags), but as we all know, the more pages one adds to
his or her site, the harder it is to constantly ensure that every page
is given an appropriately SEO-friendly title. If you have a somewhat
small site, you should be able to check all of your pages manually
pretty easily, but for larger sites, Google Webmaster Tools will gather
and present this information to you in a new “Content Analysis” section
that can be found under the “Diagnostics” tab.</p>
<h2>
- Revise meta descriptions (as needed)</h2>
<p>
Although meta page descriptions don’t have a huge impact on search
rankings, they can play a major role in convincing users to
click-through to your site, so its worth giving them a once over on a
regular basis, especially if you add a lot of new pages from
week-to-week. In particular, you should look to make sure you don’t have
any duplicate descriptions on your site. Good descriptions should be
between 150 and 160 characters and made up of compelling copy that
smartly uses crucial keywords, without using quotation marks or other
non-alphabet characters.</p>
<h2>
- Follow the trends</h2>
<p>
Using an analytics platform like Google Analytics, check the daily,
weekly and long-term search traffic trends to see what users are
responding to and what isn’t working. Find out which of your pages have
increased search engine traffic and which ones have had the opposite
effect, and then figure out the reasons for why this is the case.
Ultimately, you should have a solid idea/starting point to look at the
problems on your site that need to be addressed, as well as the
opportunities you have to increase search traffic based on user data.</p>
<h2>
- Add internal links when possible</h2>
<p>
Search engines use internal links to determine which pages the
website owners think are the most important on the site, so to help your
rankings and show off your best stuff, look around your site for ways
to include links to these power pages. This is especially easy (and
important) if you are consistently adding new content.</p>
<h2>
- Seek out your best search phrases and use them a lot</h2>
<p>
Thanks to – you guessed it – Google Webmaster Tools, webmasters can
now find out what search phrases are leading users to their virtual
door. By going to the “Statistics” tab and look at “search queries,”
you’ll see the top 20 search queries that your site is appearing in,
which can help you assess the performance of your current keyword
campaigns and maybe even discover a few new ones hadn’t even thought of.
With this information in tow, you can use <a href="http://www.trafficzap.com" target="_blank">TrafficZap’s keyword density tool</a>
to receive a report about the words and phrases that appear most
densely on the page of the URL that you enter; this will help you figure
out just how well you’re using your keywords and phrases on your site,
and make adjustments accordingly.</p>
<p>
</p>
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