.png)
Maintaining a website for SEO can be challenging. At Mad Mango Marketing, website maintenance for SEO comes included with our Full Service SEO package. In this article, we will talk about what exactly we mean by “website maintenance for SEO” so you can decide if we are fit for your business.
There are several basic tasks that every website needs to be considered optimized. You most likely have heard of many of these because these objectives are very obvious, picked up by every website auditor, and most importantly easy to fix.
Your website should have proper headings on each of your service/product pages as well as your blog. Headings are words or phrases that are marked with H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, or H6 tags on the backend of your website and are some of the most easiest read content for Google’s crawlers.
What’s important here is that your headings are structured for Google to easily be able to understand what the page is about. You want your H1 tag to be at the top and contain your main keyword focus, your H2’s should be the main pieces and parts that make up the service or product in your H1, your H3’s should break down each H2, and so on and so forth.
Getting these set up once is not a challenging task and only takes a few hours of keyword research. The real work comes in A/B testing these headings after they have been up long enough for Google and other search engines to understand the page.
Alt tags are what you name your images on the backend. Just like how search engines can easily identify H1 and H2 tags, they can also easily read alt tags placed on images and often find a lot of keywords in how you name these images.
Alt tags are one time job and then future maintenance and the secret here is to be as literal as possible when describing the image.
Pro tip: check out Google’s Vision AI tools that will scan your photos and tell you exactly what keywords it would pull from that image!
Meta descriptions are the suggested 150-300 words that describe what your page is about. Similar to Headings and Alt Tags, Meta Descriptions are some of the first info read by search engine crawlers and is valuable real estate for you to tell Google who you are and what you do. Meta descriptions are more like headings than alt tags as you will need to A/B test these down the line to see what search engines like most.
Any broken links to or from your website means that when a search engine bot reads your site and clicks on a link, it finds itself on to a page with no info. This makes for a poor user experience and lower rankings for your website. With enterprise tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush we are able to quickly identify any broken links ingoing or out and easily fix them.
Site maps are what Google and other search engines use to guide themselves through your website. Depending on where your website is built we can either generate a sitemap for you or locate where your host has created a sitemap and upload it to Google Search Console. Updating a sitemap to GSC tells Google to explicitly pay attention to your site and read what is there.
This is a one time task but many have seen a positive correlation between submitting a sitemap regularly and receiving more organic traffic.
Many of the SEO agencies out there will stop at the list above. And maintaining those few tasks does take a considerable amount of time depending on the size of your site. However, there are several other items that are much more technical but still need attention. We mention some below but depending on the site there may be other steps needed to best optimize your business.
We also included a lot of information directly from the source for the topics below. We do this because these tasks can sometimes be made out to be more complex than they actually are and we think you can best benefit from reading what Google about each topic.
Straight from Google “A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. To keep a web page out of Google, block indexing with noindex or password-protect the page.”
Directly from Schema.org “Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string "Avatar" in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn't give any information about what that text string means—"Avatar" could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.
Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo!
You use the schema.org vocabulary along with the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats to add information to your Web content. This guide will help get you up to speed with Microdata and schema.org so that you can start adding markup to your web pages.
Although this guide focuses on Microdata, most examples on the schema.org site show examples in RDFa and JSON-LD too. The basic ideas (types, properties etc.) introduced here are relevant beyond Microdata - take a look at the examples to see how the details compare.”
Google’s website states that Core Web Vitals are a tool to “Fix poor user experiences on your site. The Core Web Vitals report shows how your pages perform, based on real world usage data (sometimes called field data).”
It focused primarily on “Longer page load times have a severe effect on bounce rates. For example: If page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce rate increases 32%
If page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, bounce rate increases by 106%”. You can read their case studies here.
What are they and why does everyone ask you if you want one?
There are so many different site auditing tools and every agency seems to offer their own version. But what actually matters? For starters, if you cover everything listed above you are ahead of the majority of the internet already!
Unfortunately, Google does not have any specific site audit tool that says exactly what is right or wrong with your website. We recommend using one of the 3 major players in the SEO space (Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Moz) as they collect the most data and create easy to fix checklists. 1 of these 3 tools are in every SEO agency's bag. They also cost a pretty penny so if you are sent an audit that comes from somewhere other than the big 3 you may want to do some more investigating into their SEO tactics and practices.
SEO Website Maintenance comes with our Full Service SEO here at Mad Mango Marketing. This service has provided business owners with the peace of mind that their website is being kept up to best practices and mostly kept in the background while we create great SEO content and build authoritative links.
.svg)