There are many aspects of SEO that you need to keep on top of if you want your website to continue to perform well on the search engines. Here is a selection of some of the most important tasks you need to do regularly to ensure your site doesn’t lose out.
We all know how important load speed is to website performance, because visitors will leave relatively quickly if pages take a long time to load. Just a second or two can have a big impact, and the longer the load takes, the more people you will lose. To help maintain loading speed, you should keep on top of your pictures. Any large ones should be reformatted to smaller file sizes. You should also check your image library regularly and delete the ones you no longer need. Keeping them will only slow you down.
Having lots of temporary 302 redirects can cause big problems for search engines because it makes it trickier to index pages. If you need a redirect a permanent 301 will always be the preferred option. Check your website regularly for these and ensure you change as many temporary redirects to permanent. Some content management systems make it easy to choose the wrong option by letting you set either 301 or 302. If you have a regular problem, you may need to consider a new CMS.
Metadata is important to a website and is crucial for SEO. Each page should have a unique title tag and description to help search engines and consumers. Duplicated metadata should be avoided at all costs because it could result in penalties and ranking losses. It is a good idea to check the information regularly and do any necessary changes. This will also allow you to adapt the keyword focus of key pages when necessary.
Broken pages are another area where you need to be vigilant and check regularly. If your site has lots of 404 or 500 errors it will harm the user experience and your SEO will suffer. Errors happen more regularly with large sites with lots of pages. Having a good 404 page that displays when an error is found is better than leaving a standard blank page, but you do need to fix problems on a regular basis.
The best search engine optimisation strategies will look to add content to your website on a regular basis to keep it fresh, up to date and useful for visitors. When you do this you should be looking at keywords to see what sort of topics you should be covering. Look at gaps in the content and find out what consumers are looking for so you can cover the topic.
Search engine optimisation is an ongoing job rather than a quick fix. If you want your website to appear prominently you should be prepared to work at it. We can help you to achieve this with a professional, personalised SEO campaign.