8 SEO Tips That Take 15 Minutes or Less
While a long standing concerted effort toward SEO can pay off big down the road, don’t forget that sometimes there are quick tasks that can turn the needle.
Over the years, I have heard many times from individuals desiring
success in SEO, the request could never gain approval as the resourced
time was too great of a budget allocation or that an SEO vendor wasn't
in the budget.
This is true to some extent as a full SEO campaign involves the
strategic revision to information architecture, attention to SEO design
factors, creation of quality content, a blueprint for a link-building
initiative just to name a few items. These tasks can take a lot of time
and the thought of this can leave many companies throwing SEO on the
back burner.
For those of who you fit into this group, read on for eight simple
quick SEO revisions that will allow you to potentially create positive
affect with your organic search traffic.
For seasoned SEOs this is rather elementary information but should
serve as a reminder of what should be a daily check for a site as they
require so little time to assess and can be implemented rather quickly.
In fact, you could tackle one of these items every day over your morning
coffee and in a little more than a week create the opportunity for
additional site traffic.
1. Review Your Robots.txt File; Assess Your Meta Robots Tagging
If you have a robots.txt file on your site, check by visiting
/robots.txt. You may be surprised to find out you are withholding pages,
folders, images, etc. from search engines that can drive traffic to
your site.
Additionally, run a site scan with a tool such as Screaming Frog
to assess if there are any pages on your site you are excluding via a
meta robots tag. Both of these are a very quick fix if you do find
issues.
Unknowingly tagged pages or robots.txt entries are usually the
culprit of a developer who forgot to remove the designations when a new
page rolled live or a previous site administrator who deemed the quality
content unimportant for the masses.
2. Review Your Site Organic CTR by Page; Revise the Worst Page’s Title Element and Meta Description
This is both a conversion optimization and SEO tip. The new world of
SEO is heavily focused on the message you send, whether it be search
engines or users.
Google provides click-through rate data on landing pages and keywords
in your Google Analytics account. You don’t think they are providing
this data out of the kindness of their heart do you? They are interested
in sites that feature enticing and relative search result displays for
web users.
While you may have many landing pages with atrocious bounce rates,
identifying the worst one or a few will allow you to revise them in a
short span of time to reflect listing users want to click. Simply visit
your Google Analytics account and traverse to the Traffic Sources-Search
Engine Optimization-Landing Pages section. You can also perform this
test through the Keyword dimension of this analytical area as well.
Ultimately, You are improving your site in the eyes of the search engine and you may retain some visitors at the same time.
3. Assess Canonicalization of Your Domain
It only takes a moment to rid yourself of one of the most common forms of duplicate content and link value dilution.
Do your site pages exist at www.example.com and example.com? If so
then you need to create a permanent 301 redirect directing all non-www.
site pages to the www. version pages of your site.
Search engines don’t want to see two versions of your content. It's
helpful to combine the inbound link equity of these versions into one
page as many people don't always target links to your www version of
site pages.
4. Review Your Most Frequently Linked Pages on Your Site
Through the use of a tool such as Open Site Explorer
you can gain information in the server status of your most linked
content. You may find out a site page that went viral last year and
gained a ton of links has since been deleted from the server and
displays a 404 code. Additionally, you may also see that a heavily
linked page has since been temporarily redirected and is in need of a
permanent redirection.
Finding a few of these can result in a few quick redirects to help boost the link value on the domain.
5. Review Your Site for Duplicate Title Elements
Do a quick check of duplicate title elements in Google Webmaster
Tools. This can indicate duplicate pages, keyword cannibalization, and
bad title element structure.
Checking this Google property feature can quickly show you these
issues and give insight into whether you need to spend the next 15
minutes writing unique title elements, creating redirects, or thinking
about which of the multiple pages should include a certain keyword term.
6. Find Your Most Authoritative Links; Request an Anchor Text Change
I see it all the time, sites which have links from very authoritative
sites anchored on the text Click Here, Buy, Learn More. It drives me
nuts!
All your anchor text doesn't need to be keyword-rich, but it helps to
identify your strongest links and reach out to these sites and request a
text modification to a non-branded are partially branded variation. You
can assess your anchor text by linking site authority with tools such
as Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO.
7. Review Your Link Targets in Your Site Navigation and Any Other Sitewide Links
By reviewing the links in your main, footer, breadcrumb and any other
supporting navigation you can quickly assess if you have duplicate
content issues with pesky default pages (e.g., /index.html). These pages
should be redirected to the absolute page and the links should also be
revised to target the absolute page. These revisions clean up many, many
internal linking deficiencies across your site.
8. Verify Your Google and Bing Local Listing
As web users become more localized in their searching behavior it
becomes imperative that your off-site listings are owned by you. It
doesn’t take long to claim your listing and show search engines that you
have control over your external profiles.
Another reason this is a must: this is also believed to be a local
algorithm ranking factor. Look to establish verification with other web
profiles on sites such as Yelp down the road.
No More Excuses
Creating an SEO friendly site is no longer too expensive or too time consuming. Taking 15 minutes out of your day here and there can do a lot to the search marketing success of your site.Editor's note: This column originally was published on February 6, 2012, and comes in at No. 3 on our countdown of the 10 most popular Search Engine Watch columns of 2012. As the clock ticks down to 2013, we're celebrating the Best of 2012 by revisiting our most popular columns, as determined by our readers. Enjoy and keep checking back!
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