So, you have a website, but is it any good?
You probably spent a lot of time and effort creating your website – whether you built it yourself or painstakingly guided someone else into creating exactly what you wanted. But then what happened? A few years rolled by, and you didn’t give it a second thought? Or you have ‘updates’ in the back of your mind that you’ll figure out how to do “when you get time”?
A lot can happen on the web in a couple of years, so has your site been left behind?
Below is a handy Website Health Check infographic. It outlines some basic steps to consider in relation to your own website – to check that it is still relevant and working for you and your business.
Here are some of the key points;
Start at the very beginning
Ensure you’ve got the basics right;
- Is Google Analytics installed to give you an insight into visitor numbers, devices and demographics?
- Do you have Google Webmaster Tools?
- Have you installed SEO tools for your CMS (eg. Yoast for WordPress)?
- Do you have an XML Sitemap, and has it been submitted to the search engines?
- Is your website mobile friendly? Google recently announced that this will affect your rankings in their search engine: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html
If it’s built right, they will come
Ensure your website has a solid foundation – has it been built correctly?
- Check your site can be indexed by the search engines
- Ensure page titles exist, are unique and relevant
- Make sure you have meta descriptions that are accurate and useful
- Validate your HTML
- Optimise loading times
- Ensure menus work and can be crawled by the search engines
Gain momentum with great content
- Is your content up to date, relevant and useful to your audience?
- Identify and remove any duplicate content (as you could be penalised for this by the search engines)
- Make sure images and video are discoverable – do they have adequate descriptions?
Study your site’s architecture
- Ensure URLs are descriptive
- Shorter URLs are easier to use or remember
- Use heading tags to segment content and include your keywords within them
Manage your brand
- Create social media accounts for your brand and link them back to your website
- Post useful and relevant content
This infographic was originally published on Webmag.co