Not every business thinks to get an SEO consultant on board right from the start. Indeed, a lot of businesses worry more about obtaining any kind of net presence before they take more broad-ranging factors into account. Unfortunately, not including SEO in your site’s plan from the start can create troubles in the future.

Of course, optimising an older site is possible, and can be easy depending on your needs. Optimising a site is quite like renovating a house. If you have an older house, the renovation can get a bit more complicated as deeper problems are uncovered. If you have an older site that needs optimising, the process will be more complicated depending on the issues that come up.

There are obviously many ways to salvage the work put into an older site. The search engine optimisation techniques available to you in this situation range from the gentle and non-invasive to the aggressive. As you go up the scale, more effort and budget will be involved, but so will more effective outcomes.

The first steps to take when optimising an older site is to go over your content and links. If you’re strapped for budget, this can be done in steps. It is always a good idea to get an expert on board to avoid costly mistakes down the line, but you do have control over what is done and when. The very first step is to formulate your keyword list. For this you will need access to analytical tools and keyword resources. Talk to us at SEO Consult for help.

Next, go over the internal links in your site. Remove irrelevant terms and focus each page to a maximum of three keywords. To ensure that your pages will reference each other properly in search engine results and other off-site referencing pages, all of your links should feature the full URL. For instance the link ‘/puppies.html’ should be changed to ‘http://www.domain.com/puppies.html’.

Optimising the anchor text on your pages is another relatively small refurbishment that can return big results. Your keywords should be used in your anchors, as anchor text effectively tells a search engine spider what the linked page is about.

Once you have done what little smaller tasks you are able, your next step will be the bigger moves, such as applying SEO to your content and tweaking your navigation. Again, the size of these tasks will depend on what your site already has. If you spent a chunk of budget on good content when launching your site, you should have less work, but remember that overhauling content is always a big task. You also need to plan a strategy for supplying fresh content continuously to your site, as search engines are known to like fresh content. A blog is a great way of fixing this problem, although it will require constant attention.

These steps are not concrete, and not all sites will approach search engine optimising in this way. When optimising an older site for the first time, don’t get too excited. Pages shouldn’t be optimised for more than three keywords, and keep your content as natural as possible. A lot of SEO beginners make the mistake of over-optimising their site and losing even more ranking points. Hiring an SEO company can be of enormous help in this situation and saves a lot of stress.

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