By Matt Chansky
11/30/13 – With all the Google updates, it important to date this article so you, the reader, know the information is fresh. With all the focus on Social Media, and deservidly so, it's important that you don't neglect the most important part of your SEO program–your website.
Cars need tune ups and airplanes go into the hanger to get optimized for the next flight. If you are a web owner that has the “upload it and leave it” mentality, consider adding a monthly tune up to your website. Ten to fifteen minutes here and there can only do one thing—make you more successful.
1. Start small with the meta information.
Make sure that each page, if possible, has a different meta tag description and title description. Matt Cutts of Google is on record that Google prefers unique Titles and Descriptions for each page.
a. Examine the Title meta tag on each page. Does the tag describe the page contents? Does the tag contain the right keywords to drive traffic to that page? Is at least one part of the Title geo-specific? Example, “Attorney, Los Angeles, CA” and not just “Attorney” or “Lawyer” for “My Law Firm.” Is the title going to grab someone's attention in the search results? Make sure it's not too short or too long. Try to keep it to 100 characters or less.
b. Examine your Description meta tag and put it through the same process questions as the Title tag. The description should ideally be between 150-160 characters.
2. Check your links. Use a free online program to make sure you don’t have any broken links. Go to your favorite search engine and type in “free link checker” and use one that looks good to you. You never know, in the course of making some quick updates the week or month before, you may have simply mis-typed a hyperlink address. It's always good to make sure your site is clean and free of broken links. Both search engines and visitors get irked when the link does not work. And while you are at it, make sure that your .htaccess file is up-to-date with any redirects.
3. Do a little market research. The quickest and most intelligent way to jump-start your SEO is to examine your competitors. You will either become savvy enough to eclipse them or you won’t. Pretend you are someone looking for the goods or services you provide and begin typing in keywords/keyword strings into Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Observe which companies come up on the first and second pages of the search results and study them. Study their page content, page titles, file naming conventions, and meta descriptions – you can also check to see how they are doing on social media.
Steps 1, 2, and 3 can be repeated at least monthly—whatever your schedule allows. The next 2 steps go a little deeper into your maintenance plan.
4. Analytics. If you do not have analytics on your website, you are flying blind. You have no idea how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from and how they got there. There was a time when Google Analytics, which is free, was an absolute. However, because of changes in Google's policies, it's no longer that useful. Why? Because you won't get keyword data, at the very least. AW stats (free, check to see if your web hosting already offers it) and Clicky (which is about $75 a year) are other options. Clicky is well-worth the $75 per year, particularly if you are also running AdWords. But there are other alternatives out there if you look hard enough.
5. XML Sitemap. Make it easy for search engines to know all the pages that comprise your website. Simple go the xml sitemap generator website and they'll make what you need for free. Simply download the file and then upload in your root folder. From time to time check to make sure it's up to date. Ideally, any time you add a page, you want to create an updates sitemap.xml file.