If your site has been running for a few years now, and it has undergone a few renovations over the years, it is time to give it a fast but good clean-up. As web sites grow and change they end up with issues which you may well not even be conscious of. So this makes it an ideal time to do a little maintenance on it.
So let's look for some of the little things that if left to their own devises can turn into huge problems.
Check your website for broken links:
Check your site often for broken links, now I am talking both internal links on your site and external links from other sites pointing to yours. Now you can always click on every link in your website (not fun), use a Firefox extension called "Link Evaluator" which will check all of the links on each page of your site as a single operation (page by page), or look for a free or commercial spidering tool, which will check the links on your entire site with just one request.
External incoming links can be checked by doing a Yahoo search (Google is not as accurate for this) to see what sites have indexed pages pointed to your site. You do this search by typing in "link:" in the front of your domain name or domain and page name. Go through these results confirming each page has your link. If your link is missing contact the site owner and nicely ask for a link back to your site, they should have no trouble doing this as they used to link to you.
Check for Title tags which are missing or set as default:
As you most likely already know, the page title is a big factor that the search engines use to decide what subject your web page is about. The problem is when you use a program such as Dreamweaver to start writing a new web page and forget to change the default title, or if you hand code a new page and completely forget to include a title tag.
You can check for your pages (which are indexed) that are using the default title tag by doing a search such as "allintitle:untitled document site:Put Your Domain Name Here".
Duplicate Titles:
At the same time as you are checking your web pages for absent and default titles, why don't you also check for titles which are the same? When you use the same title tag on a sizeable number of pages (which is never a good idea) well then you are in essence making your pages compete against all the others with the same title. Locating the pages on your site can be easily done using basically the same process as above. Just substitute the untitled document part with the duplicate title you had been using.
Check your Meta Descriptions:
I am convinced you know that the meta description tag is hidden text which is located in the head section of your pages. Sometimes the content in this tag is used as the descriptions for your page in the search engine results page, so you want to be sure to make it portray the page's contents as accurately as possible. Being sure to not just duplicate this description across your entire site. I am only talking about the meta description tag here and not the meta keywords tag which has no real use in today's SEO so it is best not to use it at all.
Your website's ranking in the search engines may be suffering as a result of some or all of the problems I have described here for you. Begin fixing these problems now while they are simple, because as your website grows the issues will only grow with it, and your search results may go down because of it.
Author Resource:
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