You know that SEO hygiene matters, but you may not be sure how to get down to business in terms of cleaning yours up. Fortunately, a better understanding of the basics can help you get a better handle on your business’s SEO hygiene – rendering it sparkling clean in the process. If you feel like it’s always something when it comes to SEO, you’re on the right track, but improving your SEO hygiene doesn’t have to be a herculean effort – and once you set the wheels in motion, the resulting benefits can provide a significant return on your investment.
Why Is SEO Hygiene So Important?
Much like your home, your website runs more smoothly when you take care of matters related to basic housekeeping, and this is exactly why SEO hygiene is so important. When you are proactive in terms of SEO hygiene – instead of waiting for your site to demand attention – you help keep your website in a stone groove, which translates to all the following:
- Running smoothly and intuitively for your customers and clients
- Buffering against outside forces that can upend your efforts
- Supporting your site’s carefully constructed marketing maneuvers and overarching goals
- Setting your website up for long-term – as opposed to fleeting – success
The best way to tackle your SEO hygiene is by diving right in, so let’s get started, shall we.
What Is SEO Hygiene Again?
You’ve heard the term SEO hygiene bandied about a lot, and you likely have a pretty good idea about what it means. There might, however, be more to the concept than you realize. You engage in the daily rituals of living by washing your face, brushing your teeth, and a whole lot more – because personal hygiene is integral to living your best life. SEO hygiene plays the exact same role in relation to your business’s website. The idea behind SEO hygiene is to take care of all those background details so that your website can shine. Top-quality SEO hygiene can help in all the following ways:
- Improving your site’s rankings
- Establishing your business’s credibility and trustworthiness
- Establishing your business as an authority in the applicable field
- Generating increased revenue
SEO Best Practices
In order to maximize your SEO hygiene, you have to be on top of SEO best practices. If you are lagging behind in any of the following categories, your early efforts should begin here:
- Your site’s page titles
- Your link-building (external and internal) efforts
- Your content’s headers and sub headers, keyword targeting, meta tags, and alt tags
SEO Hygiene: Getting Down to Basics
There are several SEO hygiene basics that you should be focusing on.
Cleaning Up Your Code
Your site’s code supports its infrastructure, which makes it paramount. While you can’t be expected to understand the ins and outs of all the nuanced code that comprises your business’s site, you should have a good feel for your customers and potential customers’ overall experience (in addition to keeping the search bots out there in mind). The bottom line is that you want users to find the information they seek in as seamless a manner as possible, and search bots, like Googlebot, are the gatekeepers. If you have code that interferes with your users’ experience or that runs afoul of Google’s mighty reach, your traffic and rankings are likely to suffer. Doing a technical SEO audit every time your code changes is a must.
Taking Ownership
The content on your website can grow quickly, and the more people who are involved with its upkeep, the greater the risk that the lines of communication will break down and that you will experience gaps in your SEO hygiene. The risk of duplicate content is real, but effecting systems – and lines of communication – that help contributors and teams of contributors stay in their own lanes can reap significant rewards. If your company is large, this is a component of SEO governance, and if not, you may want to put one person or team in charge of managing all your content. Another approach is appointing someone to interact with all content – to help ensure that your efforts are not diluted.
Keeping Things Mobile Friendly
You want your visitors to describe their experience on your site as being as smooth as silk. And because more and more people are turning to their mobile devices every time they go online, you need to be hyper-vigilant about ensuring that your site’s mobile offerings are keeping up. Regularly verifying your site’s mobile experience is a critical component of SEO hygiene.
Redirecting
When you have a lot of different people working on your website, it greatly increases the chances that you will end up with a redirect loop. Further, when multiple redirects conflict with one another, it can hike up your load times and generally stress your servers. Making testing all redirects from the outset part of your protocol helps to bypass redirect concerns – and allows you to tackle them head-on when they do crop up.
Assuring that Quality
Quality assurance is the bread and butter of your SEO hygiene efforts. Even relatively minor changes to your site’s code should receive the QA attention they deserve.
Monitoring that Architecture
Your website’s foundation is its architecture, and any change in this arena is a primary change that requires careful attention. Keeping the navigation process seamless is key, but site cohesion also matters, which makes staying on top of all the following a primary concern:
- The principles of design
- Internal links
- The elements of navigation
- Headers and footers
- Formatting
If your site’s architecture begins to crumble, you can expect big picture problems that can negatively affect user experience, search bot interaction, and your crawl budget.
Call Us Today to Speak with a Digital Marketing Professional
The digital marketing experts at The Web Guys have reserves of experience and insight related to squeaky clean SEO hygiene, and we’re here to help. Learn more by connecting with or giving us a call at (317) 805-4933 today.
