7 Simple SEO Steps You Might Have Missed

You’re launching a brand new website, or you’ve redesigned your existing website. You and your web designer have spent a lot of time on keyword research, creating strong content, and optimizing site structure. It looks great, it functions well and you’re pretty sure it’s ready to go live. But while focusing on the big picture, you may have missed some small, but key details like these.

1. Create a Custom 404 Page

Broken links happen, they’re not that big a deal. But if a visitor clicks on one, you don’t want it to be a dead end that causes them to leave. A simple page that apologizes and tells them something has gone wrong, through no fault of their own, and gives them some new options for where they’d like to go next can save face and improve traffic.

2. Consistent Titles

When your website comes up in the search results, you want people to know it’s yours on sight. Setting up a consistent site-wide title structure is essential for this. Placing your business or website name in every title tag, either before or after a short keyword rich descriptive title of the pages content does this effectively. For example … “YourBusiness – This Page’s Content” or “This Page’s Content | YourWebsite.com”, etc. It presents a sharp, coherent and appealing presence in the search engine results, and that leads to more click-throughs.

3. Custom Meta Descriptions For Every Page

It’s true, the Meta Description tag is not a contributing factor to search engine rankings, and as a result is often neglected in favour of focusing on more SEO worthy content. But the description tag is what potential visitors see in the search results and can definitely influence the searchers decision about what to click. To maximize this potential, create a unique, informative, and interesting description tag for every page of your website. Think about what the potential customer wants to see here, keep it concise and make it inviting.

4. XML Sitemap

Creating an XML Sitemap with the URLs of all your new web site pages is the fastest way to let the search engines know where it all is. Or, if you have redesigned, the site map can let them know that things have changed, and how your new site is structured so they can re-crawl it. If you have any content that the bots won’t be able to find on their own, or content that is difficult to crawl, an XML Sitemap is particularly important. There’s not really any evidence that providing the search engines with a sitemap will get the site crawled any faster, but since they’re giving you the opportunity to communicate with them through the document, it just seems like the right thing to do.

5. Set Up a Google Webmasters Account (and Bing too!)

It’s free, it’s easy to set up, and it creates a dialogue between you and Google about your website. You want that! By verifying your website with Google you’ll gain access to a variety of data showing how Google sees your site. It will inform you of any problems Googlebot may be having crawling it, how many incoming links Google has counted, and lots of other useful information about your website . There’s also a similar system available at Bing, so it only makes sense to get verified and set up an account there as well. If you’ve re-designed, you may need to re-verify if your previous verification tags or files have been removed.

6. Tracking

Some kind of analyzing traffic tracking software is a must. Not a hit counter, but web analytics software that tracks every visitor, telling you how they got there, what they looked at, and how long they stayed. This kind of data is invaluable and essential for learning about how your customers are reacting to your site. Make sure the tracker is getting every page and set up your goals. If you’ve redesigned, make sure the tracker is getting the new pages, and re-adjust your goals as needed.

7. 301 Redirects For Moved or Deleted Content

These are very important if you’ve redesigned. When you move content around, or replace it with something else, this can cause broken links you may not even be aware of. Don’t lose traffic or search engine rankings unnecessarily, simply put a 301 redirect in place that sends visitors and search engine bots to the new location. There’s some debate as to whether a link to the old location will be fully counted towards the link popularity for the new location, but either way, it certainly couldn’t hurt.

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