Prepare your company website to climb Google

When you begin to optimise your website for better search engine rankings, the best place to start in with all things technical.

My 7 part series will arm you with the basic skills to get your site ready to climb online.

Let’s get started.

What will we be covering?

Part 1. Explain website maintenance to me and why I need it
Part 2. How to submit a sitemap to Google
Part 3. How to check my Google sitemap and fix any errors
Part 4. How to identify and correct 404 error messages
Part 5. Learn how to redirect old pages to new pages
Part 6. How to check your website SSL or
Part 7. Getting your website prepared it for the switch to SSL

So what is website maintenance then?

Website maintenance is a thorough routine of checks that will identify issues that may be present on your website. If present, these issues will require addressing.

The errors can hide in many places, such as;

Inside your website HTML/PHP code
Your web hosting may not be optimised for the best performance possible
A database or other server issue may be present
A component or plugin code may be out of date

By using a rigorous routine of preservation (after all, you are looking after your business and it’s future), you are in a prime position to fixes errors on your website with the minimum of fuss and without taking your site offline.

That is it in a nutshell.

Why do I need to carry this out regularly?

The internet and more specifically your website is a fluid entity. It is always changing, developing, advancing.

By its very nature, what could work today may well be broken tomorrow and suddenly your website has an issue.

Even a single issue can impact badly on your rankings in the search engines.

In some cases, it can even result in your website not ranking at all!

Website crawl errors can prevent your page from appearing in search results.
Not my words but this is straight from the horses mouth! Source: Google

The entire process can be very time consuming and I fully recommend using a professional webmaster to assists.

But if your budget is tight, allow me to show you a few simple, easy to action upkeep tasks that will help keep your website healthy.

Let me explain website maintenance to you for free

To explain website maintenance to you, I need to make a couple of assumptions as set out below;

Your website uses a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla
You have set up your website inside Google’s Search Console (Link opens a new window)

What you will be able to complete at the end of this series…

Sitemap submission checks with Google
Correcting 404 error messages
Redirecting old pages to new pages
Checking your website SSL or
Preparing it for the switch to SSL

Conclusion

Website maintenance can be quite technical but for any level of a webmaster, the basic tasks can be accomplished quite quickly and easily.

Learn how outsourcing your site management needs can benefit your company as you climb the search engine rankings.

I do hope you can join me for the second part in this series which will demystify Google sitemaps and how to submit them for beginners and intermediate webmasters.

Thank you for stopping by.