If you’ve taken our advice and added a blog to your website, then this article should be extra useful to you!
The fact is, once you’ve published a blog post and shared it with the world, it’s never actually finished (or perfect, for that matter). There’s always more you could to to improve it, especially when it comes to SEO.
The more time that passes since the publishing date, the more likely it is that various errors will pop up. It’s just the naturally changing nature of the web.
That said, you should get into a habit of conducting a periodic site audit with a tool like SEMrush to ensure that your blog posts and pages are clean, error-free, and Google-friendly. Here are a few of the more important things to look out for:
If you changed your URL structure or perhaps the URL slug for an individual blog post or page, you should always be sure to update any links you have to that page elsewhere on your site. Thankfully SEMrush can easily detect which pages have broken internal links so that you can easily go back and tweak them.
Note: Don’t forget to create a 301 redirect for any pages that you’ve changed the URL for. The WordPress plugin ‘Redirection’ is great for this.
Internal links are extremely important for SEO because they create a tighter web of information for your site, and thus a more authoritative site in the eyes of Google. But when you have several broken internal links, it weakens this web and hinders your rankings on Google. So be sure to check periodically and correct any broken links that come up.
Similarly, broken external links are inevitable when other sites you’ve linked to go and change their URL structure or page slugs. Over time these tend to accumulate, so as a best practice you should get into the habit of checking for broken links and either correcting or removing them from your site.
External links are just as important for SEO purposes because they tell Google which sites are similar to yours in topic. If you’re linking to broken pages, Google will question your authority on the topic – plus, broken links hinder the user experience. Providing broken links to your site visitors is something that Google looks down upon and can also negatively impact your keyword rankings. Make sure you get these fixed on a regular basis!
If you’ve included prices and dates in past blog posts, there’s a very good chance that these have changed over time.
It’s pretty common for prices to rise over the years, so if you’ve mentioned any… it’s a good idea to double check the source and see what the current price is, and adjust the mention of it on your site as needed.
Similarly, if you’ve posted about anything time-sensitive, for example a contest or giveaway you’re hosting that ends by a certain date, you’ll want to make sure you’ve closed off entries after they’ve ended so that people aren’t continuing to apply or submit after the deadline. Simply remove the form or the instructions from the page and replace them with a note saying that it’s no longer active or valid.
Last but not least… good SEO hygiene says that you should be constantly monitoring your keyword rankings and making tweaks to your SEO on an ongoing basis. This means that the keywords that you optimised your blog posts for a year or two ago may no longer be a priority today, and that you should re-optimise as needed.
Rock Solid Marketing is a trusted Mildura marketing agency servicing the Sunraysia and Mallee region since 2017.
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