6 Ways to Clean Up Your SEO

If you haven’t taken a look at your SEO efforts recently, your site could actually be hurting your traffic. Things like poorly written page titles or bad meta descriptions could be working against you. Here are 6 easy things you could do to clean up your website’s SEO efforts.

Check your page titles. This is a great place to add in keywords, so make good use of it. Your page titles should effectively use the most relevant keywords for your business. Use descriptive words as well as your location, and make sure that all of your page titles vary. Duplicate page titles could hurt your website’s SEO results.

Write your meta descriptions. Make sure you do fill out your meta description. Without it, Google will pull text from your page, even if it doesn’t quite make sense. Like your page titles, make good use of your meta descriptions. Use keywords, your location and anything else people would use when searching for your business.

Add keywords to your images. When you add an image to your pages or posts, you can include titles, URLs and other text to your images. Though not all of these are seen, they do add extra text to be indexed by the search engines.

Check your headings. Are your headings set up correctly? Heading tags, like H1, H2 and H3, aren’t just helpful for making your post look good. There’s a hierarchy to them; with H1 being the most important, H2 coming next, and so forth. Always use H1 for your most important stuff like your page title, and go on from there.

Create a sitemap. If your site doesn’t have a site map, you need to create one and submit it to Google. A sitemap ensures that Google crawls your content. If you need help creating one, visit this page from Google Support. If you already have one, double check it to make sure there are no errors. If you find errors, update it and resubmit it to Google.

Make your navigation easy to read. You want search engines, and readers, to find their way around your site, so make it easy for them. Get rid of anything too fancy; stick to a simple, readable menu bar. You may also consider placing your navigation at the bottom of your site as well, to give Google extra chance to index your site.

SEO is still a great way to get lots of organic traffic so it pays to make sure you are doing it right. Double check your website’s SEO for any of these 6 things. They are all easy to correct, and doing so will help you gain the traffic you deserve.