Tidy Your Website to Prep for Big SEO Upgrades

Friends, our #SummerofSEO is coming up, and we’re here to help you prep your SEO before the fun starts so that your site can be ready to

Consider this the juice cleanse before starting a new fitness regime. It’s a way of tidying up your website to prepare it to get some amazing SEO boosts in the coming months. Read on for the to-do list!

A site that is prepped for SEO is:

Cleaner

Neater

Tighter

And when your site is fully scrubbed and prepped, it makes space for the Google crawl bot to zip through the pages of your site, rather than dodging around all the clutter. We dub this process “The SEO-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (your website)”

 

Keep in mind that Google only has a limited amount of time–and nobody really knows how much it is–to crawl your site. And this crawl time budget is why it’s SO important to make sure that

Pro tip: “Crawling” is the SEO term for what happens when the GoogleBot scans your site. The GoogleBot is Google’s version as a “spider”, the generic term for the tool that crawls a site. Every bot has a limited crawl time, and while no one knows just how much each site gets, we do know it’s fast. So having a tidy site is essential.

 

Tips to Clean up Your SEO:

Before you get started:

Sign up for Yoast Premium. If you’re serious about getting great SEO, this plug-in is SO worth it. We recommend you do this before you do any other tidying, because Yoast will automatically provide redirects for pages, preventing you from having broken links (a big SEO no-no).

1. Remove unused plugins
2. Remove pages that are just drafts
3. Remove unused or old images from your media library
4. Organize your categories
   • Limit the total number of categories to 8-12
   • Do your categories accurately represent what your site is all about?
   • Are there roughly equal number of posts in each category?
5. Sign up for Google’s webmaster tool.
   • Here’s a great video on what this tool is and how it works.
   • Sign up here, and follow the steps to add your website
6. Set up Google.com/business
7. Link social media profiles to your site
   • Only link to the ones that you use consistently, and for business
   • Link to your website from your social accounts.
   • Use Social Warfare to track and monitor your social accounts*
8. Sign up for our FREE SEO Audit

 

And finally….do a DIY SEO Audit

Take just about 10-15 minutes to stalk yourself online, and you’ll have a much better idea of how your organic reach is performing.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Write down the top 5-10 keywords that you want to be known for.
2. Google yourself (be sure to use an incognito window!)
3. Google your desired keywords

We’ve written a whole post about how to do a DIY SEO Audit, so if you want extra credit/ brownie points/ amazing SEO mojo, follow the steps outlined there.

Let us know how it goes!

Friends, we hope this is helpful! And if it feels overwhelming, just take it step by step. Give yourself 30 minutes each day to focus on SEO, and you’ll rock through this list in a week or less. And you’ll be on your way to great SEO in the process if you would like more, sign up for our SEO Performance Mastermind that is coming in June!

We’re cheering you on! And as always, send us note, carrier pigeon, or smoke signal if you have questions!

Xoxo,

Meg and the Clapping Dog Media Team

 

*Yep, this is an affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you anything extra to use it, and it helps us continue to bring you free content like this post. And of course, we love this tool and wouldn’t recommend it if it wasn’t great!

2