The ideal setup when it comes to your company website would be that all search engines index every single one of your pages and crawl them frequently. Some of the issues preventing this from happening will be discussed in this article. You want to remove crawl errors and now is the perfect time to give your search engine strategy a review. It’s always best to be up to date on the latest search engine optimization techniques, we recommend reviewing your strategy every three months, and then reading up on the latest search engine updates to see what is important to have in your site and what is not. For instance, about six months ago, Google and other major search engines started putting emphasis on video and the importance of video on your website.
Social media marketing is one of the hottest things in search engine optimization right now. Before, having a website for your business made your company look more professional, and this was the norm. Now companies are investing time and money in social networking sites. There are different methods for social media marketing, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and others. Either way, you will want to use social networking for SEO.
Lets get back to reviewing your current SEO state. Whether you have a company managing your search engine optimization or you do it yourself, you should review your SEO to see how it’s performing. Hopefully the company that manages your search engine ranking, social media marketing, and video marketing sends you a performance review sheet. This will allow you to easily see what is working, and what is not. Then you can use this data to focus more on whats working, or change the techniques that don’t. A good tool to check for errors on your pages is Google Webmaster Tools. We have already written an article explaining what Google Webmaster Tools is. If you have a gMail account, then it’s simple to start using and setup Google Webmaster Tools.
Look for errors on your page, usually they are 4xx errors or 5xx errors, such as a 404 not found, or 400 bad request, 500 internal server error, a list of all the HTTP status codes can be found on Wikipedia.org. If you have moved pages that cannot be found, then the first place to start fixing them would be your webserver’s .HTACCESS file. We recently moved our website to an all WordPress site, and used to store our blog postings in a directory called /blog/ on our server. Well now that everything has moved to the root directory, we had to update our HTACCESS file to point to the new place on the server. Our site was already indexed on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, and we didn’t want to lose our rankings, so this was our only options. There are plenty of guides on the internet to editing the HTACCESS file and can easily be found by performing a search on Google.
When it comes to content, you want to keep your site relevant. We don’t write articles on how to groom your dog, simply because thats not our niche. There are some quick and easy programs out there that tell you they can generate content for your site. Often times these tools, apps, or widgets are generating content that is not relevant to your company, business or product. Now would be a good time to review the content on your website and look for ways to generate traffic on your website. You can review popular keywords with online tools such as KeywordSpy. Use the information you find from Google Webmaster Tools and keyword tools to optimize content and ensure that it is focused around a central topic or theme. Using these tools will allow you to see (at least in Google’s eyes) if the content is relevant to your website and its objectives.
Why not take the time to review existing rankings? See how your website ranks on certain keywords and keyword phrases. Don’t forget that SEO is a process, and it takes time for search engines to re-crawl your site and update the SERP. If you don’t know your current rankings, then knowing if the changes you are making to your SEO strategy will be difficult to tell if they are working because you didn’t find a baseline for your current status. I know this sounds repetitive, but you should definitely research and document each pages rankings, so that when you change things like the META tags for instance, you can look down the line several months, and see if what you did has actually helped.
Now that you better understand things like content, keywords and keyword phrases, the use of online tools such as Google Webmaster Tools and KeywordSpy.com, you can start to review your websites performance in SEO. Search engine optimization combined with social media marketing is the key to getting your business noticed on the web. There are other things you can do, such as creating and publishing videos on your website and integrating a blog into your site that will help with SEO. Don’t forget to document where you are now, so that when you do commit to making changes, you can look back at your notes to see what has helped and what has not.
