COMMON SEO ISSUES YOU CAN FIX IN AN AFTERNOON
An afternoon's work... of SEO...
Taking on the optimisation of your own business site may seem like a daunting task and while you may want to take the approach if hiring one of the many SEO companies out there or picking from one of the many cheap SEO packages to give your site a boost in the long run -- there are some pretty simple steps you can take to fix a lot of common SEO errors that might be holding your site back from performing as well as it could be. These are some easy to fix (assuming you have basic access to your website or ftp server) issues that you can probably do in a spare afternoon.
Create a Robots.txt
The first thing we are going to do is create a Robots.txt file. This instructs Google and other search engines what to do when they come to crawl and index your site. You can let all crawlers in, or you can block crawlers for images crawlers or for the mobile site index or specific search engines and so on. You can even allow the crawlers into certain folders and disallow them from crawling and indexing others. This may be a good option if you host personal files in some folders or there are admin and configuration folders that search engines don't need to be indexing. It's a very simple format and can be written and uploaded in about 10-15 minutes.
Submit to Google Webmaster Tools
Second we are going to submit your site to Google Webmaster Tools. This verifies you own your site. You need to upload a file to your server or add a few lines of code to the header of your website to verify it's yours. Once you have done this (and added both the http:// version and the http://www. version) you get access to a whole bunch of tools that help you keep track of your website and issues that your site may have. You can crawl and check for malware. You can submit a sitemap, you can see how many searches your site appears in, you can see how your +1s are doing and loads of other tools. Basically it's well worth adding your site to and if your site ever gets into trouble you can e-mail Google for a reconsideration request or if you change web addresses you can easily update and inform Google where you have moved to.
Create an XML Sitemap
This brings us to our next step. Create an xml sitemap (there are plenty of free tools to do this) and submit it in webmaster tools to make sure Google knows which pages you want indexed. You can also set your geographical targets in webmaster tools so if there is a country you are targeting with your site you can set that. (If its worldwide then don't bother with this setting)
Analytics...
If you can get proper access to your website -- install some Analytics code. Google analytics works great and is free so give that a go but there are other options too and some hosting companies have their own set up. It's always worth keeping track of how much traffic you are getting, how people are finding you and so on.
Hosting Changes
If you can get access to your hosting CPanel or don't mind editing your .htaccess file. Make sure your site only has one home page and and URL structure. By this we mean http://www.site.com http://site.com and http://www.site.com/index.html and http://site.com/index.html can all be seen as different pages on your site and people linking to different versions will split the overall power given to that page.
Redirects
You can set it up so http:// redirects to http://www. or visa versa, but pick which you like and stick with it. You can also redirect index.html to the full site address or / this can sometimes cause issues and infinite redirects but if you can get it working then set it up. Also make sure when you link back to your home page internally that you link back to / or the full site address and not an index page itself. This should give you plenty to get started on and each issue really doesn't take that long to sort out and is a great way to give your site a really good fighting chance and doing well in the rankings and stay in Google's good books.
[common seo issues]
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