It is important to keep your website up to date in order to provide customers with a tool that is always current, relevant, and high-performing. Completing these duties on a consistent basis improves security, enhances user experience, maximizes functionality, and ensures that the website’s design and content are always up to date.
Some website maintenance duties can be completed with even greater efficiency. Maintaining the seamless operation of your website can also benefit your SEO efforts, increasing the likelihood of your website appearing in search results.
Here are ten specific actions that, if carried out on a constant basis, will help you boost your SEO efforts and, as a result, your visibility among your target audiences.
1. Optimize Existing Website Content
The material that currently exists on your website should not be neglected as part of your website maintenance activities. Instead, you may increase your SEO performance by continually tweaking the material you already have on your website.
Consider, for example, the following measures to make your existing content more search engine-friendly: 1.
- Content should be updated to reflect current subjects and keywords.
- Check all of the content for broken links.
- Create new links to other parts of your website that aren’t already linked.
- Add links form credible and high domain authority website.
- Facts and information should be updated with current figures.
It is recommended that you review and update any material that has been on your site for more than a year in order to maximize its SEO potential and to maintain it an interesting and relevant part of your site.
2. Add more page content and blog articles
Fresh content is one of the most crucial components of a website that is successful in search engine optimization. Having material that is regularly updated allows you to accomplish the following tasks:
- Multiple keywords should be targeted.
- Show that you have authority and integrity
- Encourage users to spend more time on your website by providing them with incentives.
- Create backlinks,
- and more
Fresh material should be frequently integrated into your website as part of your website maintenance strategy if you want to reap the benefits of search engine optimization and boost your rankings. This new material can take many forms, ranging from blog posts to landing pages to product pages, and it should be often. As long as it continues to provide fresh, keyword-rich content, this material will help you in your SEO efforts.
3.Fix broken links.
Broken from your site can jeopardize your efforts to impress both search engines and customers. They can cause problems for your SEO efforts in the following ways:
- Visitors who discover a broken link and leave your site will increase your bounce rate.
- Make use of the time that search crawlers could be spending on your working pages by optimizing them.
- Reduce the value of links, which is a ranking component in SEO.
Search crawlers will be happier, visitors will be happier, and your SEO presence will be stronger as a result of checking for and correcting broken links on a monthly basis.
4. Reduce the number of page redirects.
Broken links aren’t the only issue search crawlers can discover on your website when crawling through it. They may also face repeated page redirects when the link drives them to a different site for the page rather than the original destination.
Visitors to your website may not be aware of these redirects because they take place nearly instantly, but search bots will, and this can have a negative influence on their opinion of your site.
Create a monthly website maintenance routine that includes searching for and repairing excessive page redirects to help you eliminate difficulties and boost your website’s SEO strength.
5. Optimize page load speed.
You have only a few seconds (2-3, to be precise) to make an impression on website visitors. Pages that take longer than this to load are more likely to send visitors fleeing, which will have a negative impact on the bounce rate of your site.
Page load speed is also a ranking factor for Google, which means it is one of the aspects of your website that the search engine considers when deciding how to rank you in its results.
Keep your site’s performance up to par by reviewing your pages’ load speed on a regular basis and taking actions to improve it (such as removing bulky code or compressing pictures). This will ensure that your visitors and search engines alike are satisfied with your site’s performance.
6. Image optimization
Visitors’ perceptions of your website are greatly influenced by the images on your site. Even search engine crawlers will take photos into consideration when determining how to rank your page—as long as they are current and optimized for the web.
You may optimize your photos in a variety of ways, including:
- Images should be compressed in order to increase loading performance.
- Fill in the blanks with relevant copy for the alt text
- Image file names can be customized.
- Create photos that are optimized for mobile devices.
- Incorporate photos into the site map if possible.
SEO-optimized photos are more easily “read,” understood, and utilized by search engine crawlers for the purpose of determining where your site should rank in the search results.
7. Use high-quality images
Try to avoid using stock photographs on your website wherever possible. Your web support should involve regular image review and updating as needed, as well as ensuring that all of your photographs are of good quality.
Low-quality photographs can lead to a terrible user experience on your website, which can result in a greater bounce rate and a lower conversion rate for your site.
While search engine crawlers cannot read photographs that do not have accompanying copy (e.g., alt text), they can read the outcomes of terrible images and assign you a ranking based on that information. As a result, keeping your photographs of excellent quality helps keep both your users and search engine crawlers pleased with your site.
8. Optimized ON PAGE SEO
When it comes to your website’s metadata, it relates to the title and description for each individual page on your website. The optimization of this information for your desired keywords and themes is an excellent technique to increase the SEO power of these pages.
To guarantee that the metadata on your pages is accurate and consistent with your SEO strategy, your website support services should verify and optimize the metadata on a regular basis.
9. Review your Sitemaps
You want to make it as simple as possible for Google and Bing to identify the pages on your site that have been indexed, therefore you should offer a directory listing of the files you wish to be indexed. Sitemaps are what these are referred to as, as shown in the image below.
When you submit a sitemap, you are informing Google and Bing about the pages to index, how frequently you want them to be re-indexed, and when they were last updated. The file has not been modified since it was last index, therefore Google does not have to waste time re-indexing it, saving time and resources.
10. Gather and Analyze Performance Data
Review your website’s Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Search Console. These metrics provide you with a look into the performance of your website. Using this information, you can have a better understanding of many areas of your website, which you can then utilize to improve your SEO efforts.
In particular, employ analytics and search console to help you achieve your SEO objectives by analyzing things like bounce rate, length of stay, and other characteristics that influence how search engine crawlers view your website.
In the event that you notice areas that require improvement, your web support team can assist you in resolving these difficulties in order to boost your search engine rankings.
11. Update Plugins, Themes and CMS
Updating websites’ plug-ins, themes, and WordPress will ensure that there are no bugs and that they are not in conflict with one another, hence avoiding errors. When a website is down, Google is able to recognize it and does not like it, hence hurts your google and bing rankings.
12. Check Domain, Hosting, SSL Certificate Expiration
Always make sure you renew your domain, hosting and ssl certificates. Again, your SEO visibility is hurt when the website is down.
Hire Professional Website Agency
Maintaining your website in good functioning order and keeping it up to date throughout the year takes a significant amount of effort. When you are also striving to optimize your website for search engine optimization, it can be difficult to keep track of all of the responsibilities that are placed on your shoulders.
Professional web support services may be of tremendous use to the majority of small businesses, and the most of those businesses are ready to pay for such assistance.
Digital Marketing Concepts can help you develop a functional website maintenance plan that gives you with a better understanding of how your site performs and what you can do to improve your SEO results. Get in touch with us right now at 239-244-2009 or message us online to learn more about the website support and administration services we provide.