End of Year Housekeeping for Robust SEO Campaigns

Ah, mid-December! Unless you’re Amazon, it’s the quietest time of the year for most of us in the SEO industry. Nobody wants a mortgage or a car or life insurance.

Of course, SEO life returns to its normal, breakneck pace come January, but for now let’s have a look at some pre-emptive tasks we can make time for that can help boost the efficacy of the New Year campaigns. You know, the sort of stuff that you pore over diligently and rigidly when taking a new client on? That can tend to lapse unless you have very robust monthly processes in place.

Now is the perfect time to do some housekeeping; get all your on-page and techno-ducks in a row and reap the benefits come New Year.

Spot-Check Errors by Site

One of the easiest ways to do this is via Bing or Google Webmaster Tools, particularly if you're an agency or freelancer managing multiple sites. In Google, select the first site and go to >Health on the left menu, then >Crawl Errors. These are the errors that Googlebot encounters when trying to crawl pages on your website. Some of these errors might be permanent and considered a hard error and some of these errors may be temporary, such as errors that are related to an overloaded server.

Having errors on your site won’t directly hurt your SEO but there will be indirect impact on what you’re trying to achieve. If you have a lot of broken links on your site, this will be something of annoyance for users but also may impede the path of crawlers around your site, making it a little harder to get to deeper content or new content in some cases.

Additionally, errors in the 500s can be similarly impeding for users and robots in equal measures. Such errors are server-related – 500 is indicative of an internal server error; 502 indicates that the server is under strain (commonly seen if the site is under DDoS attack); or 503 indicates the server has given up the ghost, been moved, or your own connection is lost.

Become familiar with common HTTP response codes. If there’s an unusual one appearing in your crawl errors then it’s easy enough to look it up as you come to it.Investigate why the error is occurring if it is still occurring checking the difference between the Last crawled and First detected dates.

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