4 SEO New Years Resolutions
Howdy!!! It's time for New Years resolutions, isn't it? Are you all about the usual ones - exercise more, eat less crap, be nicer to everyone? No? Well, that's OK, you're human.
However, let's talk about some resolutions for your SEO efforts. These should be realistic, they should be implemented, and used faithfully. I'm only going to cover a few for you, to keep it simple. While there are many other resolutions we could make - publishing new content at least three times per week, for example - these can really make a difference in a short amount of time for you. Even if you only do one or two, you can see some better results for your site's pages fairly quickly.
Website Audit
When was the last time you audited your website for:
- Duplicate/missing meta tags
- Permanent 404s
- Inappropriate 302 redirects
- Disallow commands on certain pages or globally
- Broken links
Any of these, or a combination - or hell, even all of them - can knock your pages down in search engine results. These are all within your area of command, and they should be addressed on an individual page basis and resolved.
Inbound Back Link Analysis
If you haven't done this ever, and your pages are still ranking, congratulations! That being said, with the Google Penguin penalty and manual penalties that the Google webspam team issues, you really owe it to yourself, your website and your page rankings to pull down all of your back links and analyze them carefully for:
- Inappropriate, spammy sites linking to you
- Keyword-rich anchor text that can earn you a Google Penguin penalty
- Broken links from relevant, authoritative sites that can boost your pages
Two More SEO New Years Resolutions
Competition Analysis
Got online competition? These days, who doesn't? Are you monitoring your rankings for keywords and pages, as well as those of your competitors? It's not a bad idea to check out how they're doing every several weeks or so. You'll need third party ranking software to do this, but it's easy to set up and run. Compare how you're ranking against them, and if they're ahead of you, re-do those pages with better content, get some better links to those pages and make sure you're using keyword phrases that your target audience uses in the search engines.
Google Search Console
It never ceases to amaze me how many folks set this up on their site, but never look at their dashboard. Between checking to see if you have manual penalties, or if your site has been hacked, this free tool is worth it's weight in gold. Even better, you can see average rankings for keyword phrases your pages show up for in search results, click through rate and impressions. This is a great little tool to help you develop or refine your content strategy!
So what are you waiting for? Schedule some time and run through these activities. You might be surprised at what you uncover! Analyze the results, develop an SEO action plan, and fix those nagging issues. You'll get better rankings and more visitors to your site to increase your chances of converting them to customers!
Not sure how to do these tasks? If so, come to Invenio SEO's training courses! You'll see how easy it is to learn how to do your own SEO in no time.
Hey, we also have online training for SEO as well!
Until next time, stay safely between the ditches, my friends!
All the best to you,
