SEO Check-Ups

This month, why not make sure that your website is on the right track, with an SEO check-up?  Start the New Year with a clean, polished, and SEO friendly website, and you’ll get more from your online marketing, and enjoy a profitable 2015.
Search engine optimisation is a complex field, and there are a lot of things that you will need to  look at to ensure that your site is as efficient and SEO friendly as it could be, but before you rush out to contact SEO agencies, take a quick look at this list.  Once the basics are in place, you can turn to SEO agencies to take your site to the next level:

• Loading times:  Slow loading times can push you down the search results.  Use the YSlow extension for Firefox to identify things that are slowing your site down, and fix them.
• Meta Tags: While Meta search engines aren’t as popular as they once were, meta tags are still important.  Make sure all your pages use them, and that they contain relevant keywords.
• Broken links: These are a very bad thing.  Use Google Analytics to identify any dead ends or broken links, and fix them.
• Keywords: Is it obvious what they keywords on your site are?  Make sure they appear on your pages, and make sure that your site’s formatting emphasises them.
• Poor code:  If your site looks bad in certain web browsers, requires unusual plugins, or slows down browsers on old PCs or netbooks, then you could be losing a lot of visitors.  Keep your sites clean and simple.
• Poor accessibility: Accessibility means more than just having Alt-tags for all of your images.  If your site requires a big screen and a high bandwidth connection to navigate, or requires JavaScript, mouse-only navigation, or any other restrictions that would stop some people from using it, then maybe you should re-think the design.
• Incoming links: Link building is important.  Do you have a lot of relevant incoming links?  IF not, this is something SEO agencies can help with.

The above points are all fairly easy to fix.  Invest a few days in cleaning up your website, fixing broken links, and making sure that your site’s code validates properly.  Once you’ve done that, you can work on building links, running an advertising campaign, or working on social bookmarking.
Be sure to give your site regular “check-ups” once you’ve got everything ticking over.  Bugs, errors, and invalid code can sneak in from the strangest of places – new advertisements may use bloated code, CMS updates may break your template, or a well-meaning intern could delete an out-of-date page and forget to put something in its place.  Don’t let such changes go un-noticed for too long.  The quicker you fix them, the better.
Frequent SEO health checks will ensure that your site stays in the top spot of the search engines, which is exactly where you want it to be.