Written by Lesa Seibert | 11 July 2011
Posted in SEO Tip of the Week

by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media

It is essential to check the SEO status of your website by running a quick checkup.  All size sites will benefit greatly from this overview to gain insight into how effective your pages and site are.

If everything is working perfectly, all of the pages on your website would be accessible to the search engines and crawled with frequency.  Most websites have issues in the form of crawl errors which keep search engines from indexing pages on the site.  Working to remove these errors will give the search engines an easier path to crawl your content and help with SEO efforts.

First you should identify the pages that are returning the errors and start correcting the problems.  Find pages with broken links using the free W3C Link Checker that you can get from http://wsm.co/fZsIGv.  Then either build pages that the broken links go to or implement at 301 redirect to send users to the correct destination.  You will be surprised at the impact this can have on search engine rankings.

Another opportunity to remove barriers is to reduce the amount of duplicate content on the website.  Those areas that are most prone to duplicate content are title tags, dynamic URL's, meta descriptions and product descriptions.  A useful tool to aid in the fight against duplicate content is Xenu Link Sleuth.  The tool provides information on broken links and for possible duplication issues.  Another option is Yahoo Site Explorer.

Next week we will look at site relevance and current rankings.

< Prev		Next >