Improve Your Onsite SEO

In a post-Panda world, far too many people have seen their quality content suffer in Google rankings. Poor rankings equals less traffic which equals less business being conducted. While there are some things that can be done to improve page rank that cost tons of money, there are also a few very inexpensive things you can do to begin climbing back up the Google indexing mountain.

Start by cleaning up your links. Conduct a site-wide sweep to remove dead links before doing anything else. Once that has been done, use a tool like Crazy Egg that will show you exactly what links your visitors are actually following. Links that are seldom followed are links you don’t need. What you need to remember is that linking, in theory, is about prioritization. If you are making everything a priority then in actuality you are making nothing a priority. Clean it up!

Create unique META descriptions. Meta description tags admittedly have very, if any, impact on your ranking they do serve a purpose. In a somewhat indirect way META tags often determine what your search snippet is which can correlate to your click-through rate. They also can help a page appear more unique and valuable which doesn’t hurt any.

Shorten up your long title tags. Title tags that are too long generally weaken the impact of keywords. Take at look at how often your homepage title appears on your site. Let’s say that your homepage title is “Ed’s discount shoes putting our best foot forward since 1989.” Ask yourself, does that appear on every page in some way shape or form? If a visitor went to each page with they see that combined with something like “Women’s Shoes”, Men’s Shoes, Children’s Shoes” etc…? If the answer is yes, you are overusing it because you are diluting the power of your keywords. By all means, avoid repeating core keywords on a mega scale.

Finally, make sure that your anchor text makes sense. Your anchor text should reflect whatever keyword strategy you are using. Going back to Ed’s Shoes as used above, if you are ranking a category page don’t  rank “Women’s Shoes” as 4-7 for instance. Main navigation links should always incorporate your keywords. “4-7” means very little to search engines, but “Women’s Shoes size 4-7” makes a world of difference. Be specific always!

These quick tips can help boost your indexing in most cases. They are far from the end all be all solution to lost page rank being recovered, but they are a good first step. Not everyone may find these fixes quick or easy, but for most they are a painless way to improve site ranking.