Whether your website is brand new or has been around for a while, it’s important to keep it healthy in every way you can. Both Google and your audience will be a lot more likely to visit your website if it stays fit. Now, this may take some effort and time, but like most things that do: it will be worth it. To give you a helping hand, we’ll discuss how you can work on the SEO fitness of your website. Without working up an actual sweat!
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A healthy website is a happy you
Do you remember way back when you first created your website? Taking your time to make sure it looked good, both on the outside and inside. But at that time, you probably didn’t think about how to keep your site healthy in the long run. You were just happy to have it up and running.
Maybe, shortly after, your attention shifted to other things. Forgetting about your website. Forgetting to keep an eye on its performance and health. We all drop the ball from time to time, but you can pick it up at any moment. It’s not too late!
It’s time for a fresh start. Now is the time to get your website in shape again and practice some SEO fitness! You have to learn what is best for your site, what it likes and what it doesn’t. Give your site better content. Become more flexible. Push yourself. And improve on the accessibility so anyone can enjoy your site.
Investing time and love in your site will pay itself back. Before you know it, your hard work will get you better results on multiple levels. You will attract new people, maybe even achieve goals you never dreamt of before. One thing is for sure; your site will get a lot more attention!
What do we mean by SEO fitness?
Before we start our workout, it’s important to know what we mean when we talk about SEO fitness. As your website gets older, you need to do more in order to keep it fit for the search engines. Is your site SEO fit? Is your content fresh, and your technical SEO up to par?
Similar to keeping your body fit, it’s important to spend time and effort on all the different parts to see an effect. And to really benefit from the effects, you also need to keep this up on a regular basis. You can’t expect to win the race when you haven’t kept up with your training, and the same goes for your website. You can expect to be the number one result if you don’t put the effort in and work on your website.
Transcript
Is your website SEO fit? Are your pages ranking as well as they could be? To help people find you online, you need to make sure your website is in ship shape. How do you do that? With regular exercise. Now, you don’t have to do the same exercises every time. It depends on what needs your attention at the moment.
Let’s say you have a website on which you often share new content. New content is great, but you also need to go back and work on your older content every once in a while. Perhaps it could use an update!
Another exercise that keeps your website healthy is internal linking. This means you link your pages to each other, creating a connected website with a structure that makes sense.
But it’s also important to work on your technical SEO. For example, you need to keep improving on the speed of your site, as this becomes more important every day. When you check your site’s speed regularly, you’ll become aware of your progress and what you can still improve on!
And, you don’t want to have two of your pages competing with each other for a spot in the search results, right? That’s why you need to work on preventing duplicate content!
Now, there’s lots you can do to keep your site fit! And Yoast SEO can help you. Our plugin can be your personal trainer that gives you advice tailored to your website. Because we know it’s hard to keep at it. But remember: a healthy website will get you more attention in the search results and more visitors!
Technical SEO fitness
Building a site is great, but maintaining and improving it is how you can grow your audience and keep people coming back. An essential part of the fitness of your website is the state of your technical SEO. You need to make sure that search engines are able to reach your pages, that your website is mobile-friendly, fast and that you’re outputting the right structured data. All of this plays a role in getting people to your website and offering them an excellent experience!
Technical SEO quiz
We realize that technical SEO comes across as a bit of an abstract term. That’s why we’ve created a quiz that you can take to find out where you stand. And what you can still work on:
Technical SEO routine
To get your technical SEO in ship shape, there are a few exercises you can do. Check out this workout schedule to get an idea of what you can to get your website SEO fit:
Check and improve your site speed
The faster Google can crawl your site, the more it will do it, and the easier it is for you to get more indexed in the search engines. And Google constantly underlines the importance of site speed, so work on it to stay in the race!
Check the mobile friendliness of your website
Your mobile site has to be easy to use, fast, and offer a great user experience. Thanks to mobile-first indexing, Google uses the mobile view of your site to determine how to rank your site. So, make sure that your mobile site is up to par.
Create an XML sitemaps for your site
XML sitemaps inform search engines about what has changed on your site so they only need to crawl those pages. This helps them quickly find your content to index and rank it. And that’s why you need a good XML sitemap.
Set up canonical links and meta robots
Meta robots tags allow you to give Google instructions on how you’d like them to crawl or index parts of your website. So, take control of what pages will be shown in the search results by using meta robots tags.
Use canonical URLs to battle duplicate content
When you have duplicate content on your website, Google may not know which page to show in the search results. Don’t compete with yourself and set canonical URLs to tell Google which page you want to rank with.
Add structured data to your pages
Structured data helps search engines get a better, deeper understanding of what’s on your pages. Which makes it easier for them to show your page as a rich result. So make sure to add structured data to your pages!
Fix any crawl errors in Google Search Console
Among other things, Google Search Console checks if there are any crawl errors on your website that you need to fix. Use Google Search Console to find out which URLs need to be worked on.
Content SEO fitness
Besides your technical SEO, the fitness of your website is also determined by the state of your content. Are you updating your content regularly? Are you managing it well enough to get the rankings your content deserves? You need to do keyword research from time to time, rewrite stale content, redirect outdated content and so on. All of this benefits your rankings and keeps people on your site longer. Don’t worry, we’ll help you and your website get going with content SEO fitness.
Content SEO quiz
So, how can you know if you’re updating your content often enough? Or what to think about when it comes to the content on your website? Our content SEO fitness quiz helps you figure out what you’re doing right and what you can still improve on:
Content SEO routine
There are several exercises that you can do to get your content happy and healthy again. This workout schedule tells you exactly what to work on end up with fit content that’s ready to climb those rankings:
Improve the internal linking of cornerstone articles
Cornerstone content is your most important content. You need to have lots of links pointing towards these pages, as this number of links is how Google determines how important a page is. So link to your cornerstone content.
Link in context when working on internal linking
Google can determine whether a link is useful to a reader, on the basis of the text in which we’ve embedded this link. As Google is very much able to understand context, you need to make sure that you link contextually.
Avoid those dead ends and fix your orphaned content
If an article has no links pointing towards it, it’s hard to find for Google. We call these pages orphaned content and when you have them, you need to decide what to do. Fix your orphaned content to avoid dead ends!
Refresh your keyword research from time to time
The world and how we search online is constantly changing. That’s why keyword research never really ends. You need to update and renew your keyword research to keep your content in good shape and continue ranking.
Find and fix keyword cannibalization
When writing a lot about a topic, chances are your content will sometimes be very similar. Without realizing it, you’ll be competing with your own content. Prevent this by finding and fixing keyword cannibalization.
Rewrite old and outdated content
Stale content should be updated. Your audience and Google will question whether or not the information is still valid when it’s older. Rewrite it every now and then to keep that content fresh and up to date.
Redirect outdated content that’s no longer relevant
We know it can be hard to throw content away. However, some blog posts and pages may not be relevant after a period of time. Think about announcements of events or products. Make sure to delete and redirect these pages.
Yoast SEO as your own personal trainer
Creating a monthly routine keeps your website and SEO fit as a fiddle. But if you really want to win the race and get that gold medal, you should consider a personal trainer. Someone who can guide you and give some pointers on what to improve on.
Yoast SEO can be your personal trainer and help you with the heavy lifting when it comes to your website. First of all, our plugin handles a lot of the technical stuff for you so that you can focus on the parts of your site that you want to focus on. It also helps you create redirects, provides you with an XML sitemap and adds structured data to your pages!
Your own SEO fitness schedule
But that’s not all, Yoast SEO also gives you feedback that’s adapted to your situation, as any good trainer should. It gives you pointers on how to improve your text, both for search engines and users. And it tells you when your most important content needs an update, which content doesn’t have any links to it yet and when you’re using the same focus keyphrase twice. Yoast is always in your corner!
The post Get your website back into shape with SEO fitness appeared first on Yoast.
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