There are many areas you need to watch out for if you are trying to keep an eye on your SEO within your business. Even when working with an SEO consultant, most businesses want to be able to keep up with their site’s optimisation.

The first is ‘minimise the size.’ A lot of sites simply upload their images as is, then resize in their code. It will take a lot less time and use up a lot less space on your server if you shrink your pictures before uploading them. All good photo editing programs have a resize function. You will rarely need pictures that are bigger than ten centimetres square, although you can plan your picture space before uploading.

You can also afford to lose some of the resolution from professional pictures. The industry standard for print is 300dpi, meaning 300 dots per inch when printed. When viewed on a computer screen, pictures don’t really need to be anything more than 200dpi. The ability to change the resolution should be somewhere near the resize function and will also reduce the file size.

Focus is very important in SEO. Keywords should be used specifically and chosen for different areas of your site. When optimising pages, don’t try to squeeze in more than three keywords per page. Keywords need to be strictly on topic if you want to rank well for those terms.

Support your pages. If you have a site of more than a few pages, your internal linking can be used to boost the ranking of a particular page. If you have a new page you desperately want to draw attention to, link to it from your top three or four pages, including your home page. In this way, you can boost the authority of the new page through the influence of your main pages, which you have of course built up with your excellent SEO methods.

Don’t get too attached. When you first optimise your site or revising your optimisation strategy, you need to be ruthless. Clean up your site by removing pages that don’t serve your subject, and tighten the content of those that are a little aged.

When you remove pages, don’t forget to implement a 301 redirect to a similar page. Redirecting to your main page can cause you problems with the search engines, as it isn’t similar to the page you deleted.

When looking at your site, think simplicity. The KISS acronym is really a cliché these days, but when it comes to your site you do have to keep it simple where possible. Keep each page down to a minimum for swift loading times. Your site’s viewers will appreciate it, and your content will get to them quicker.

Remember that changes on your site will take time to take effect. Giving each of your changes a couple of weeks at a minimum to show results can be frustrating, but hang in there. Part of the art of SEO is knowing when to stop tinkering and wait. If you have any questions about the optimisation of your site, talk to us at SEO Consult.

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