So, Ive been knee-deep in prepping to migrate and upgrade an old site. As always happens when you start one thing in tech-land, a bunch of other item popped up demanding attention.
First it was updating WP itself along with its associated plugins and themes. Then an enforced trip to Google Webmaster tools which I’d not looked at for a while highlighted a few issues such as soft-404s and other errors. “Well, may as well fix ’em while I’m here” I thought. So, I did. (I may have been better being disciplened and pencilling those tasks for later while I continued with job number 1).
Another push command to re-verify my site led me to Google Analytics – which again popped up a couple of things needing attention.
At this point, any non-self-hosted website option was looking good! Managing the back-end of a site is something most of us don’t think much about but it’s necessary and if you do things right can mean a lift in rankings and user experience.
Learning more about SEO and implementing the available tools is something that should be on every website owners list – even if you have a support person doing that for you.
In my travels I came upon a couple of resources that I’ve pegged for further reading.
Here are two useful sites I found.
- Yoast’s very own tips and techniques
- Hobo’s nifty tutorial on SEO for beginners
- as well as their useful advice on Duplicate Content
Prefer a cheatsheet? Try these…
How about an SEO Checklist instead to run through and tick off?
- SEJ have an easy-to-follow listing
- Bit more detail? – try Bruce Clay’s
- Step by step SEO by Clickminded
These will be a great start to brush up on my knowledge and I will schedule diary time to go back into my sites and tweak things.
If you have been focused on content with only a cursory glance at SEO then why not join me in refreshing and actioning some steps that will help Google help you?
Happy SEOing!