Completing the SEO on your website can feel a bit like checking items off of a list. Links? Check. Keywords? Check. Social? Check!
With all of the different steps needed to get your website ready for search engines, it’s easy to let a few slip through. Some SEO steps don’t get the same attention as the ‘big’ steps, and so it’s no wonder that they’re often forgotten.
The first is the sitemap. Most sites don’t automatically create a sitemap for you (or they do, but they may be incompatible with Google’s indexing software), but it is an essential part of the SEO process. It tells search engines which pages are on your site, and where to find them. It makes it much less likely that the search engine will overlook parts of your website. Sitemap tools are usually free (XML-Sitemaps.com is one option), and then you can add the sitemap to your Google Webmaster account, to assure quicker and more accurate ranking.
Page speed is the second consideration. A slow website is going to lose traffic. It’s estimated that 40% of visitors will leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. It’s also going to be harder for search engines to index your site, something that is going to factor into how your site gets indexed. Your site speed is determined by your server, in part, and by the amount and type of content you have on your site. A page with text and a couple of small pictures is going to load much faster than one with several interactive features. The trick is to work around those features and still make sure your site loads as quickly as possible. Both Google (Google Page Speed) and Pingdom Tools have a site speed tool to help you measure how quickly your page loads.
It’s a sad fact of the internet culture that content theft and plagiarism is a common problem, especially for sites that publish quality content. Not only is this content theft dishonest, it also can hurt your SEO. Google checks the content it’s indexing on your site against the content it already has in its index. If it finds your content on someone else’s site, it can’t tell who the original author was. Even if you wrote the content, your site will likely lose SEO rank. The best way to deal with this problem is to run your content through an online plagiarism checker on a regular basis (Plagiarisma.net is one tool option, or just run part of your text through a search engine). If you find duplicate content, contact the website owner and ask them to remove it. If a few requests go unanswered, or if they outright refuse, you can contact their website hosting service, alert them to the duplicate content problem, and the hosting service will usually take the site offline until the stolen content is removed.
Are there any other SEO steps, basic or otherwise, that people often overlook?
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