Once you have a website in place and you’re happy with it, it’s natural to focus on other activities like link building, blogging, and social media, leaving your site to tick over in the background.
Taking the time out every now and then to check your site is a must though; it can flag up issues that would be hidden otherwise. It can be hard to keep track of meta data, duplication and broken links but these might be undermining you SEO activities and affecting site visitors’ experience.
Flush out SEO website errors
There are several tools available online to help you; I use these on The Artlab’s website as well as prospects and customers’ sites. They’re not only useful for highlighting problems – they can also help you review your on-page SEO strategy.
Google Webmaster Tools is simple and free to use and you can use it to find out about:
- Crawl errors – URLs in your site that Google could not successfully crawl or that returned an HTTP error code. This can be found under Health in the main menu
- Meta data errors (e.g. missing or duplicate tags such as title tags). These can be found under Optimization / HTML Improvements
At The Artlab we’re members of SEOmoz, which gives us access to their Crawl Test tool (you can access it by signing up for a free trial).
The results are comprehensive and the spreadsheet format is very easy to work with. In addition to the features offered by Webmaster Tools, you can find out about duplicate page content and address it, either by using rel=canonical or re-writing copy; otherwise these pages compete with each other for rankings.
Another important benefit is that the test will tell you whether individual pages are being blocked by the main search engines, not just Google.
Supporting your on-page SEO
The spreadsheet format of SEOmoz’s crawl test allows you to see the main tags and the keyword focus for every page. From an SEO perspective, if you decide to review and make changes to your keyword strategy, this bird’s eye view of your web pages helps ensure your tags are unique and not competing with one another.
If you would like us to audit your business website (free of charge), including a crawl test and SEO review, please contact us on 0161 875 2528.