Use These Three SEO Tips to Avoid Site Penalties

These days, almost every business relies on the established Search Engines to help with sending qualified visitors to their site. For that reason, it’s important for Small and Medium-sized company owners to remain diligent about properly maintaining their website to avoid getting penalized and losing their positions in Search Engines.

Here are three SEO tips to help keep your site fresh, relevant, and penalty-free.

Remove All Invalid Links

If you’ve been running a business for a few years and provided links to other websites using your blog or site, the chances are good that a percentage of these links are going to stop resolving to the original destination. While it’s true that these links have expired through no fault of your own, as the site owner you have to take the needed steps to clean these links out to reflect that someone is “home” and watching the shop! But don’t fret! These changes are good – and you might even find that some of the links you created to your website are outdated, giving you the opportunity to repair and adjust your site as needed!

Reasons that links may stop resolving to the source material includes the domain expiring, the website changing owners or management, a site getting re-designed and having old content dropped or web pages renamed, as well as some domains getting reverted to the ownership of the original Registrar.

To streamline this process, you can use a link checker to do a preliminary run through your content pages to flag links that connect with a resource that’s no longer there or gave an invalid return code. This program will do much of the ‘heavy lifting‘ however; it’s worth doing a human review of all links that didn’t get flagged just to be sure that the content hasn’t changed and that it still meets your standards. Further, it will help Search Engine Spiders operate more efficiently and give further quality signals that your website is getting professionally managed.

Protect the Security of Your Visitors

In recent years, larger search engines have put an emphasis on awarding website operators who take the time to secure their site with an SSL Certificate for an https connection. By investing a relatively small amount in your online presence, an SSL Certificate helps establish trust and rapport not only with the Search Engines but your website visitors as well. It is always assuring to know that when browsing a site, your information isn’t getting made available to others because of an insecure website.

An SSL installation is somewhat of a technical issue. If you aren’t sure how to put SSL security into place on your site, you’re well served to seek the advice and help of a web development company who knows what has to be done to assure that your site meets the standards that the search engines expect. Failing to make an SSL connection available could result in lower visibility in overall search engine results.

Check That All Technical Details Are Right

Believe it or not, what you might be thinking is an SEO penalty might originate from missing out on important technical details. Being a comprehensive webmaster requires that everything is done right! When making changes to your site, be sure to make a note of any significant adjustments getting made, as these changes could affect your results – hopefully for the better, but sometimes for the worse! Doing something like disallowing your robot.txt file by accident and walking away from your computer without realizing it would have disastrous results. On the surface, this could easily get construed as being a penalty – when, in fact, it was the result of operator error.

Web sites that aren’t mobile-friendly with fast response times are also problematic. Search engines tend to favor sites that can handle the bandwidth and meet the demands of the visitors they are directing there. With more and more people using – or completely relying on – mobile devices such as Smartphones and Tablets to access the Internet, responsible website owners know they have to cater to this growing segment of Internet users as part of their far-reaching and forward-thinking digital marketing strategy!

If you’ve noticed that your website isn’t performing as well as it once was, I hope these tips and pointers are helpful with getting your web presence in line with a few of today’s best practices. Should you need more help in accomplishing these things, give us a call at 1-877-830-3318 to discuss your project!