Search Engine DO's

If your website was well-designed and optimized for SEO but is more than 2 years old, what do you need to do to be sure it is still ranking well?

FIONA SAYS:

This is where the DO’s come in.

A. Just because it’s 2 years old is not a negative in itself. If you’ve been doing even minor occasional updates to it, you’re letting search engines know that the site is “active” and you should be able to at least maintain your ranking results.

B. If you haven’t been doing any updates, time to think about what you might add or update on the site to breathe some new life into it. The most important on-site factor for search engines is text-based content (your copywriting.).

You might want to start with some fresh keyword research to make sure the content (and Metatags) of your site are relevant to what people are actually searching for today. This could be very different from searches of 2 years ago. Keyword research is a wonderful way of finding out not only what the most popular searches are for your product or service – you’ll undoubtedly find search ideas that hadn’t occurred to you.

Fresh keyword research will give you some ideas of new information or topics you could add to your site, as well as help you update your Metatags if necessary.

C. About Metatags. There are only two that you should consider important, at least to start with: the Meta Title and the Meta Description. Think of the Description as a 2-sentence summary of the page contents. Then think of the Title as a 70-character (or less) summary of the summary.

There’s a caution, however. If your Metatags have worked well for you historically, don’t get tempted to suddenly rewrite them all. Even if you think they’re better-optimized, your site is likely to drop in rankings, at least temporarily (maybe even a few months) if you go overboard on revisions.

D. This may sound obvious, but make sure all the information on your site is current. Make sure any references to dates, personnel, and products/services are up to date. If you do have a few articles or blog posts, but they are all 2 years old, time to move on and add some new content. I recommend not deleting the old – build on what you’ve got.

E. Consider your links – both incoming and outgoing. If these haven’t changed in 2 years, your site may drop in ranking/popularity. Add a few new outgoing ones to your site. Try to obtain a few good quality links from other sites. For example, if you’re a caterer try contacting florists or wedding/event planners and ask them for a link. If they want you to link to them too – do a “reciprocal link” – that’s OK. One-way links to your site are best, but hard to get. Trading links with other good companies is better than no linking at all.

Fiona Dudley can be reached at www.weaversites.com for more information about Search Engine Optimization, Marketing & Advertising

Next week Fiona will talk about rich media and search engines.