It’s a well documented fact that Google rewards sites that have a well-planned structure, relevant external backlinks, internal links as well as simple navigation. However, is it possible to attain all these in a single stroke? Of course not, as SEO is an ongoing process, you must take important steps at regular intervals to manage and improve the overall performance of a website.
Here are a few tips to manage the performance of a website:
Crawl your website
It must be noted that it is essential for your website to get crawled at regular intervals. It can impact your website’s overall performance. It will also help you to identify broken links, different illogical URLs, missing URLs and even orphan pages.
Tips:
- Create sitemaps.
- Use XML Sitemap Generator.
- Use Screaming frog.
Check metadata
If you’re familiar with the world of SEO – you have probably come across the term “Metadata” and its importance. So, for better yields, always check title tags, meta descriptions, headings, canonical tags, etc. Try to create fresh titles and descriptions for the newly added pages.
Tips:
- Never use manufacturer’s descriptions.
- Keep your descriptions under 160 characters.
- Use metadata to convey extra information to search engines.
- Always update meta descriptions according to the competition.
Check website’s status
It is advisable to check a site’s errors/warnings/redirect loops and fix them immediately. Also look for any web page that is not showing “200” status. (200 OK – The HTTP 200 OK success status response code indicates that the request has succeeded. A 200 response is cacheable by default. Source – developer.mozilla.org)
Tips:
- Redirect all 404 error pages to a new location.
- Check Webmaster tool regularly.
- Resolve server errors.
- Resubmit sitemap whenever you add or remove any web page.
Check XML sitemap and robots file
Always submit the XML sitemaps to the Google Search Console.
According to Wikipedia, Robots.txt is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots.
Tips:
- Create an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google, Bing and other search engines.
- Generate an HTML site map to help visitors to navigate on your site efficiently.
- Use https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to generate an XML sitemap.
- Use robots.txt file to give instructions about your website to web robots.
- Generate effective robots.txt files to help search engines to crawl and index your site properly.
Check the Quality of backlinks
Businesses should know that quality of backlinks is more important than quantity. Marketers who manipulate links should understand that search engines can identify such bad tactics/paid backlinks, etc.
Tips:
- Remove low quality backlinks.
- Avoid overusing internal links.
- Always check Google Search Console for manual penalty.
- Monitor Majestic, Moz and other tools to check the health of your website.
Bonus tips:
- Track page views and visitors to see the amount of traffic your site achieves.
- Track and monitor goals: urls, time, pages/visit, events.
- Focus on the pages getting the highest bounce rates.
- Analyse page-specific conversion funnels as well as end-to-end conversion metrics.
- Optimise the website at regular intervals.
- Identify conversion-oriented pages, like landing pages and product pages.
- Consider adding call-to-actions (CTAs) that encourage visitors to click.
- Study key metrics to analyse, segment and engage your customers.
- Always think out of the box and address problems immediately.
All the above mentioned elements will help you to manage the performance of a website.
