7 Essential Website Maintenance Tasks That Improve SEO

Building a beautiful and functional website that provides stellar search engine optimization (SEO) results is not a “once and done” task for your company. A strong website requires consistent maintenance, and every website is unique. If you own and operate a website for your business, it’s essential to have a consistent maintenance schedule that ensures your site is running at optimal levels and capable of achieving the SEO results you expect.

The team at Sites by Sara knows that website maintenance is much more than just working through occasional website issues and fixes. Your site needs regular attention to ensure there are no hidden problems slowly diminishing your SEO results. We provide professional website support and management services and want business owners to know a few of the basics of website maintenance that make or break SEO.

Review Page Meta Data

One of the most important features of any webpage when it comes to SEO is the metadata attached to the page. Page descriptions, also called meta descriptions, are not necessarily part of how the Google Search algorithm ranks your webpage, but these descriptions do appear in search results, providing Search users with important snippets of information attached to the link to your site. Page titles or meta titles are also important, and they should include relevant keywords that allow Google to accurately assign a high ranking to your website’s content.

If your meta descriptions are inadequate, inaccurate, or simply lacking in substance, this will result in a negative impact on your SEO as Google Search will rank pages with better meta descriptions higher than your page. Pages without meta descriptions will instead display meta description text automatically selected by the Google Search algorithm, which is typically not something you want to see attached to your website’s link.

Check Your Indexing

Google determines which website pages to rank based on indexing. It’s essential to index your website’s pages accurately so Google can rank them appropriately. Make sure that your website support plans include indexing review. The Google Search dashboard allows you to quickly generate a report of all the pages Google has indexed on your site. It’s possible that you added a new page recently that has been indexed but shouldn’t be indexed, or vice versa. Use your indexing report to determine if any indexing errors may be bogging down your SEO results.

Update Your Website Visuals

Remember that Google and other search engines will take multimedia content into account when reviewing your webpages for search result ranking. High-quality original photography typically earns much better placement than generic stock photography. If you developed your website some time ago and had to use a bare-bones approach when it comes to the visuals you added to your webpages, it may be time for an upgrade.

Upgrading your webpage’s visuals is a great method for boosting SEO while simultaneously improving user experiences on your website. A visual update can also help your team identify other visual issues like crowded text, disjointed images, and other formatting problems that may be diminishing user experiences on your site.

Boost Page Loading Speed

One of your most regular maintenance tasks for your website should be checking your page load times. It’s safe to assume that if a search engine user clicks a link to your site but the page fails to load in a reasonable time, the user will simply click back and away to a different site that offers a better experience. If you have complex web applications configured into your website or have attached large files to your webpages, these factors can easily diminish page loading speed. Take time on a regular basis to test how quickly your website pages load on different types of devices and look for ways to improve page loading speed.

Correct Dead Links

The links embedded into the pages of your website should all connect to live pages. Internal links allow users to jump between the pages of your website while external links lead users away from your page. Sometimes, these links will become defunct without any warning. The page owner may remove the page to which the link connects, or they may completely shut down their site. You likely have no way of knowing when an external link dies, and keeping up with all of the external links included on your website can be very difficult.

You may need to use a Google extension or third-party tool to identify all the broken and dead external links on your site. However, it’s well worth the time investment to include dead link review in your regular list of website support plans.

Gather and Analyze Performance Data

Perhaps one of the most important parts of any good website maintenance plan is a solid analytical data gathering system of some kind. Data is key to making sound decisions about the future of your website, and part of your maintenance routine should be to review the performance data you have gathered and look for ways to creatively implement it. Google AdWords offers a fairly robust Analytics tool that you use to evaluate how well your website is connecting with your target audience.

Choose the Right Website Support Partner

Operating a business website can be incredibly rewarding, but it also requires consistent effort and close attention to detail. Ensuring you have a solid website maintenance plan in place can be difficult when you are trying to run your business, and the right partner can be a tremendous asset. Sites by Sara offers peace of mind website maintenance and support services that can help you streamline your site’s maintenance needs.

We can work closely with you to determine the parts of your website that require the most attention and help you identify the factors that are most likely responsible for the diminished SEO results you have been seeing recently. Sites by Sara can help you develop a functional website maintenance plan that provides you with a better understanding of how your site functions and what you can do to improve your SEO results. Contact us today at (385) 355-5351 to learn more about the website support and management services we offer.