Happy New Year everyone! It’s been a while since I last posted, but I wanted to post some housekeeping and housecleaning ideas for 2011 to get those SEO juices flowing.
Take another look at Webmaster tools
This is probably something many of you do on a regular basis. I think most of us take a look at the keyword report, the crawling stats and inbound links, but there’s many other reports in there that don’t always get our full attention. Have you setup your domain to display as “www” vs “non-www”? Should your domain target users in a specific country? Do you know if you have malware on your site?
I recently had an issue with our site CMS where it was throwing a “soft 404″ error instead of a legitimate “404 error”. Don’t know what a soft 404 error is? Well, it’s when a page isn’t found and the user is directed to what looks like an error page but the server doesn’t throw a 404 error code. Here’s some more info on “soft 404” errors. This doesn’t necessarily effect our SEO rankings to a large extent, however, in terms of serving up the freshest content to our site users, as well as search engines, it can be an issue. So even if you review these numbers on a regular basis, take a look at some of those other facts and figures you may not always analyze.
Domain Aggregation and Consolidation
If you’re a company that has numerous URL’s floating around on the web as a result of past marketing efforts, PR landing pages, microsites, affiliates, or whatever the case may be, now may be the time to get those domains in order. Maybe you registered www.company2008.com, www.company2009.com, and www.company2010.com. Should you have them all point to www.company2011.com? Or to your home corporate site? It’s better to 301 redirect them to your most current site or just to a root domain site for the time being than to just leave them floating out in the ether until a user or search engine stumbles across them. And the same could be said for root folder redirects (www.domain.com/2010contest) or subdomain redirects (2008pr.domain.com). I know that it’s easy to set and forget with some domains, but now is a good time to revisit these old domains and dust off the IT cobwebs.
What are your competitors doing?
Now you may have been savvy to what your competitors were doing in 2010, but 2011 is a new year and that means new marketing budgets. It may be time to take a look at what they’re doing on their corporate site, on any other domains you’ve been able to identify as theirs, or what they are doing externally (i.e. with affiliates or through link building). Have you identified any risks in your strategy or theirs that either of you can capitalize on? How will you know if they figure out your weaknesses or how will you exploit theirs? It’s always good to have a plan B or some kind of alert ready in case you see some serious moves from them.
New Year, New Content
As it’s the new year, that means you should take a fresh look at the content on your site. Are there old sections you can remove or consolidate to improve the user experience? Before you remove anything though, check to see if it’s driving traffic to the site and how you can make the best use of it.
Or should you promote that old content again as it’s now timely? Your site metrics may be able to tell you based on seasonal trends.
Is there new content waiting to be posted? When was the last time you spoke with your content experts? Is there anything they can share that you can use to drive additional traffic to the site? Why not shoot them an email today and find out.
The bottom line is that Google loves all content, as long as it’s unique to your site, accurate to the best of your abilities, and timely to your market segment.
Vendor Communication
And lastly, let’s talk about vendor communication. I mentioned earlier that my CMS was throwing “soft 404″ errors. Well my vendor has recently made an upgrade to the platform to eliminate those, but it was at my request. They’ve also made some other enhancements for added functionality and reporting. It was only because we speak on a regular basis and I keep an eye on our metrics to tie to the two together. As part of the new year, give your vendors a call to see what enhancements they can make to your applications or new products and services they can offer you. You’ll be glad you did. (That is assuming you’ve paid all outstanding invoices, in which case, maybe hold off on that)
Have any other SEO ideas for the New Year? Let me know if the comments.
Image courtesy of sporkist