Everyone needs to spend some time cleaning things up on their website. Even the best webmaster has a few issues they either know about and are pointedly ignoring, or are completely oblivious to. The real problem is, where do you start!
The best idea I have come up with, is to start by making sure your website is functional, both for visitors, and for search engines. It’s simply a good investment into your site to ensure it is in proper working order.
Decide On A Plan
My recommended plan of attack, is as follows:
1. You need to make sure any 404’s on your site are cleaned up and taken care of, yesterday.
A 404 error shows your visitors that you simply do not care about your site. For the longest time, webonce.com had a problem with 404 errors, until one day I looked around and realized how bad it was. Now, we don’t. And you know what? We’re getting more traffic, and business is picking up. Funny thing about that, no?
2. You need to decide if you’re going to use meta tags, and if so, you need to implement them correctly.
I’m not going to get into the debate of SEO 1.0 vs. SEO 2.0, who is right, who is wrong. Not happening here. I will say, however, that if you are going to use the meta tags like keyword and description, you need to do so correctly. Ensure your keywords appear in your content, and that your description is relevant to your content.
Tools To Help
I can think of two tools right off the bat that will be quite helpful in dealing with your website’s spring cleaning, and both are free, which is excellent!
Google Webmaster Tools – (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools)
The Google Webmaster Tools contains a wealth of various information about your website, but what we’re looking at to help us with today’s topic is located at: example.com > Diagnostics > Web crawl, and example.com > Diagnostics > Content analysis.
example.com > Diagnostics > Web crawl – This shows you the various errors Google has encountered browsing your site. Pay close attention to HTTP Errors, Not found, URL’s timed out, and Unreachable URLs. It’s hard to say for sure, but I know if I were building a search engine, sites with these problems would be assumed less relevent than sites without those problems.
example.com > Diagnostics > Content analysis – Here you can find out what google thinks about the meta tags you have set. If they’re too short, if they’re duplicated, all of that. Ideally, you’ll have nothing listed there. If you do, I would suggest working on it as long as you are going to include meta tags in your website.
How To Self Check
Using Webmaster Tools can be great, however, if you don’t want to wait until Google crawls your website completely again, you will need to be able to check things out yourself. A great free tool to do this is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. You can give it the website to check, and it will go through all the links on your pages. This is especially helpful as you can have it check external links as well as internal ones. It has been said that linking to a bad neighborhood can affect your site, so why wouldn’t linking to no neighborhood? Besides, bad links are bad business.
Websites need to be cleaned up every now and again. If you let them sit, bad things can creep in, so take some time, and check up on your site. Make sure it’s still as clean as you think it is!
