Life gets busy. If you’re maintaining a Web site, you know it takes time and constant tweaks to keep it ranking at the top of search results. We’ve got 7 easy tips that can be done in 15 minutes to ensure your site’s rankings.
1. Review Your Sites’ Index Status. Google’s Webmaster Tools service gives you the ability to review historically how many of your pages are indexed over the last year. Go to the Health menu list and choose “Index Status.” You can view a report to gauge your overall site health. Detect and solve problems before they become big issues.
2. Improve Your Google Bounce Rate Analytics. What is your true bounce rate? It’s an important metric to track. If visitors find what they need in the content and leave the site without viewing other pages, Google Analytics considers this type of visit (one page only) as a Bounce. To accurately track the high bounce rate pages that really matter, which are those with an on page duration under 15 seconds, you can add the following code to your own tracking code from your Google Analytics account:
setTimeout(“_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ’15_seconds’, ‘read’])”,15000). Once done, you should see a significant drop in Bounce Rate percentages.
3. Check your Google Place Page. We recommend that you bookmark your Place Page and visit daily to detect problems early. You can also check out the latest reviews by clicking “More Reviews” while you’re there. You’ll also want to go ahead and do this for your Yahoo and Bing local pages, and other important directory listings such as Yelp.
4. Review crawl errors. Both Google and Bing offer sophisticated reports that show you site areas they cannot crawl. If you review the reports, like the Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Error report, for 15 minutes once a week, you’ll uncover errors and be able to correct them quickly. Crawl errors could be due to a server returning a URL error like a missing page (404) to the bot, or a crashing script that is preventing the crawl.
5. Sign up for Google Alerts. Using Google Alerts, you can monitor search queries via RSS feed or email. Track keywords to see if news and other content is indexed, and much more. You can also track your company information to find out where people are talking about you. You can also monitor a specific Web page using the site:URL search query as the search syntax.
6. Write new content. What are the top questions patrons ask about your service, product, or topic? If you’re unsure, call up a couple to find out. Or, you can follow up with a customer regarding a recent purchase. Ask permission to use their comments in the article you’re writing. Please check out Copywriting and White Space – Making Readable Web Content for writing tips.
7. Adjust your sites’ “Like” buttons. If you want to influence the search results with social interactions using SEO, you need “Likes” for your Web site, not your Facebook page.
If you practice these tips weekly you will catch errors and issues quickly, and make tweaks to boost your site’s performance.