Whether your website is brand new or has been around for a while, it’s important to keep it healthy in every way you can. Both Google and your audience will be a lot more likely to visit your website if it stays fit. Now, this may take some effort and time, but like most things that do: it will be worth it. To give you a helping hand, we’ll discuss how you can work on the SEO fitness of your website. Without working up an actual sweat!
Table of contents
SEO fitness
- A healthy website is a happy you
- What do we mean by SEO fitness?
- Technical SEO fitness
- Content SEO fitness
- Yoast SEO as your own personal trainer
A healthy website is a happy you
Do you remember way back when you first created your website? Taking your time to make sure it looked good, both on the outside and inside. But at that time, you probably didn’t think about how to keep your site healthy in the long run. You were just happy to have it up and running.
Maybe, shortly after, your attention shifted to other things. Forgetting about your website. Forgetting to keep an eye on its performance and health. We all drop the ball from time to time, but you can pick it up at any moment. It’s not too late!
It’s time for a fresh start. Now is the time to get your website in shape again and practice some SEO fitness! You have to learn what is best for your site, what it likes and what it doesn’t. Give your site better content. Become more flexible. Push yourself. And improve on the accessibility so anyone can enjoy your site.
Investing time and love in your site will pay itself back. Before you know it, your hard work will get you better results on multiple levels. You will attract new people, maybe even achieve goals you never dreamt of before. One thing is for sure; your site will get a lot more attention!
What do we mean by SEO fitness?
Before we start our workout, it’s important to know what we mean when we talk about SEO fitness. As your website gets older, you need to do more in order to keep it fit for the search engines. Is your site SEO fit? Is your content fresh, and your technical SEO up to par?
Similar to keeping your body fit, it’s important to spend time and effort on all the different parts to see an effect. And to really benefit from the effects, you also need to keep this up on a regular basis. You can’t expect to win the race when you haven’t kept up with your training, and the same goes for your website. You can expect to be the number one result if you don’t put the effort in and work on your website.
SEO fitness
site speed, so work on it to stay in the race!
Check the mobile friendliness of your website
Your mobile site has to be easy to use, fast, and offer a great user experience. Thanks to mobile-first indexing, Google uses the mobile view of your site to determine how to rank your site. So, make sure that your mobile site is up to par.
Create an XML sitemaps for your site
XML sitemaps inform search engines about what has changed on your site so they only need to crawl those pages. This helps them quickly find your content to index and rank it. And that’s why you need a good XML sitemap.
Set up canonical links and meta robots
Meta robots tags allow you to give Google instructions on how you’d like them to crawl or index parts of your website. So, take control of what pages will be shown in the search results by using meta robots tags.
Use canonical URLs to battle duplicate content
When you have duplicate content on your website, Google may not know which page to show in the search results. Don’t compete with yourself and set canonical URLs to tell Google which page you want to rank with.
Add structured data to your pages
Structured data helps search engines get a better, deeper understanding of what’s on your pages. Which makes it easier for them to show your page as a rich result. So make sure to add structured data to your pages!
Fix any crawl errors in Google Search Console
Among other things, Google Search Console checks if there are any crawl errors on your website that you need to fix. Use Google Search Console to find out which URLs need to be worked on.
