Website owners often put off improving their site’s SEO because they don’t know where to begin. It’s a bad excuse, because all anyone needs to know is only a Google search away, but here’s the answer anyway. These three things that need looking at periodically will help your site perform better for users and search engines alike, and are ideal to set someone as a project.
Check incoming and outgoing links
If you’ve got incoming links from really low-quality sites, it shouldn’t be a major issue, but Google provides a tool for ‘disavowing’ them, so why not use it? There’s more information on this one here. And what about broken links inside your site? These are easy to track down and fix, so why not do so?
Optimise images
Oversized images slow down page loading time, something which has always been a nuisance for visitors, but is more important to search engines than ever. Optimising the images involves re-sizing them to the maximum dimensions they’ll ever display, and choosing a suitable image compression setting. It’s largely a manual job, so if you have a big site, start with the most popular pages.
Sort out the page titles and descriptions
Every page should have a unique title and a unique description meta tag. It’s one of the longest jobs there is for a large website, but it’s also one of the most fundamental in terms of SEO. Read Google’s notes and get a list of what you’ve currently got on your site using a website crawler (there are a few free ones knocking about, such as pasting your site’s URLs from its sitemap into this, but the paid-for Screaming Frog is what we use).