A great attitude to have towards SEO is to never be satisfied. Always be analysing, always research, and always be proactive.
Taking the time to dig deeper or double check the health of your website can reveal large gaps in optimisation.
The basic day to day fundamentals of Search Engine Optimisation can be time consuming, so getting a chance to look deeper for options to improve the authority or index-ability of your site can be difficult. But, for when the opportunity arises here are some suggestions:
Translation:
Has your site been translated for all the markets you reach? Not all traffic is English-speaking an offering language alternatives and ensuring you are targeting foreign-keyword-translations is a position white-hat step to a better website, more traffic, and higher authority.
Sitemaps:
You should already have an XML sitemap and have double checked, triple checked that all the pages Google may find and index are worth being found (i.e. Google may not crawl your entire site and this might be because you have some junk/worthless pages that essentially shouldn’t exist). Moving beyond this, an ROR sitemap is an alternative XML sitemap that is growing in popularity. The benefits of an ROR sitemap are primarily two-fold. A) it incorporates an RSS feed perfect for products if in the e-Commerce context. B) it is suitable for all search engines, not just Google.
Redirects:
Ensure all pages that are broken, have been moved, changed, or for whatever reason are properly 301 redirected. A 301 redirect carries some/most PR and therefore Google will thoroughly enjoy crawling your site and not abandoning your deeper pages. You can also use a meta refresh to display a notification to the visitor that they are being redirected to another page. And if this style of redirect is done without too long of a delay Google’s indexing will treat it kindly – more kindly than finding junk or missing pages.
Duplicate Content:
Duplicate content can be a serious problem for SEO since the Panda update. One work around is to use rel=”canonical” to inform the Google bot of a page that is the priority for indexing over another. This is especially handy in the context of old pages that still exist, but newer versions that are similar or identical have been created to refresh or update the site. The value or ‘Google-Juice’ should then be transferred from the older pages to the one you have designated as a priority.
Digital Marketing - Search Engine Marketing -