3 Tips for Capitalizing on Mobile

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It should be pretty obvious by now that the shift to accessing the internet via mobile devices is not going to wane any time soon. Some have already recognized this and capitalized by integrating mobile into their overall marketing and media plans, but there are still many untapped ways to take advantage of the mobile market.

While one ROI firm recently suggested that marketers allocate 7 percent of the budget to mobile, leaving room for growth to 10 percent by 2016,  Bill Dinan at Search Engine Watch argues that there’s a high amount of opportunities for mobile minimization and you should be giving a higher percentage of your ad budgets.

Mobile consumers tend to be more ready to buy than others, and a study conducted by Nielson found that local mobile searchers are converting at much higher rates than desktop users.

Over 60 percent of those participating in the survey said they ultimately make the purchase. 20 percent even stated that when using mobile they are often looking to purchase immediately or within the hour, which shows a window of opportunity for marketers.

We have 3 tips to help you fully take advantage of the opportunities created by mobile.

  1. Know the Mobile Customer – Any good advertiser should be paying attention to customer motivations and the ways their intents are often connected with their methods. Mobile customers have different needs and desires, and a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t going to cut it.
  2. Contact Info is Essential – Calls and location information are always an important step in the path for mobile users to purchase. Most users will want to connect with a business before making a purchase, so make sure your phone numbers and location info are clearly displayed. If the customer can’t contact you when they want to make the purchase, they will likely move on to the next business.
  3. Understand the Differences Between Tablets and Smartphones – Consumers use smartphones and tablets for different things, and it is important for mobile marketers to keep this in mind. Most smartphone users are looking for and contacting local businesses, while smartphone users tend to do more research activities. Brand websites also tend to be more popular on tablets, while local directory apps are more popular on smartphones.

If your company is ready to leap into the mobile marketing world, and you should, remember these tips. They will help get you headed towards an effective marketing plan.

 

 

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How Google’s Changes Should Change the Reports You Use

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Google’s algorithm changes over the last decade have really made huge shifts in the way we search things. They also really help developers stay on their toes.

Initially, the SEO business was all about rankings. You told your client how you would get their keywords to the top of the search, and then showed them how high they were coming up in searches. Of course, it took a while to get their site to the top, but once you did, they were content.

Now, thanks mostly to Search+, it is the job of SEOs to get their clients to stop thinking about ratings. What Search+ has done is customize the results for every search you make based on search history, location, social media usage, and other criteria. That means everyone gets results catered to them, but it also results in your client’s site not appearing high in the rankings for some people.

Sujan Patel offers some other methods of tracking how your websites are performing, all of which can be found in Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

There are simple reports like “visitor growth” that show how your site is trending quickly and clearly, as well as old metrics that have risen in popularity. Such measurement tools like Impressions give you ideas of how your pages are appearing for similar search terms.

Another old metric that has become much more useful is your site’s average ranking. In January, Google announced changes to how they score site’s average rankings and now it gives a much closer average of “how a link’s position in Google search results should be important.”

While the older ways of Google made it easier for you to see how your site is performing, the changes in recent months have actually been an improvement for marketing towards target demographics. Unfortunately, this means improving your analytic skills is essential if you want to succeed. You may not be able to give your client keywords to search to see their performance, but if you know your analytic tools, you can still quickly show them how your SEO path is helping them grow their business.

 

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7 Thing You Need to Know About Mobile SEO

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Just about everyone has a smart phone by now, so why is mobile SEO still a poor facsimile of desktop SEO? Even the most basic stats show that mobile SEO is worth paying attention to, as mobile devices accounted for 13% of all searches in June 2012 with 20% of clicks.

The problem is creating a mobile site isn’t easy, and effectively optimizing any given site for a mobile audience relies on several criteria.

SEO consultant Aleyda Solis at the BrightonSEO conference listed seven of the criteria you should consider when optimizing a site for mobile SEO, and we’re here to help you through it.

  1. How does your audience behave on your site? – Before you invest time and money into a mobile site, it’s first important to know if you even have enough of a mobile audience to make it worth your effort. Using Google Analytics, you can create a segment for organic mobile traffic, which will allow you to look at the volume of visits, devices used, and the landing pages they tend to hit, as well as what are the most popular keywords. If you know what type of content is most popular with mobile users, you can prioritize it when creating a mobile website.
  2. Where does your site appear in mobile search results? – Where your site appears in mobile search results is helpful in knowing what content you need to optimize for mobile use. Investigating these statistics, as well as what keywords and pages are already gaining visibility will help you prioritize.
  3. How does your audience use mobile search? – Knowing how your target audience uses mobile search allows you to make yourself more visible to them and increase your traffic. You can use Google’s Keyword Tool to find the keywords your audience are using, and Our Mobile Planet lets you check how consumers are using their mobile devices.
  4. How does your site render on mobile devices? – Testing your content on mobile devices is essential when designing a site because if your content doesn’t render correctly, visitors will promptly leave. Using Google’s Getmometer, PageSpeed Insights and the ‘Fetch as Google mobile bot’ in Webmaster tools, you can see how mobile users and bots see your website.
  5. What content and products are you offering to your mobile audience? – Mobile users are often looking for different content than your desktop visitors are. Identifying what your mobile customers are after, lets you know if you are catering to their needs. Often, mobile users focus more on localized content. If that is true for your audience, are you offering localized content? If you’re not, are you able to create some?
  6. Do you have the technical capacity to develop a mobile site? – If your website isn’t rendering correctly on mobile devices, you need to consider if you have enough of a budget to make it responsive, dynamically serve content or build a parallel mobile version. Each method has its pros and cons, but ideally you need to use responsive design. That’s not always possible though, depending on technical capacity, budget, and content needs.
  7. Based on these criteria, decide what type of mobile site you need – Depending on your site’s needs and abilities, you will know how you need to respond to creating a mobile site. David Moth at Econsultancy has a flowchart to use to make it easy for you.

There are different ways to handle mobile optimization, and hopefully this list has helped you identify the best route for you, but there is one thing that is true no matter what. Mobile SEO is becoming more important every day, and ignoring it is only hurting yourself.

 

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What Should You Be A/B Testing?

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Anyone reading this should know they should be testing their websites and landing pages, but if you aren’t well studied in optimization, how are you supposed to know what you should be testing? Oli Gardner has some suggestions to get you started testing your site.

1) Test the Headline – Your headline is the first things viewers will see when they land on your page, and to be most successful it should match what your viewer expected when deciding to visit your page. For example, you can test how positive or negative language performs in your headline, such as “Save Time by Downloading Now”  vs. “Stop Wasting Time, Download Now”.

Headlines are also used by your audience to quickly identify if the site they came to has what they want. Make sure your headline lets visitors know what you have to offer immediately. A great way to quickly test this is to just show the headline to someone unfamiliar with your brand for 5 seconds and ask them what the page was about. If they don’t know, you have a problem with your headline.

2) Test Your Forms – Most landing pages will have some sort of form trying to gain information from visitors. Its important to remember however that you should be offering something to your visitors in exchange for this information. What you offer is up to you, but examples could be an e-book, webinar registration or whitepaper.

The question remains though, how do you test to see if your forms are effective? One test would be seeing which forms people fill out the most, if all fields were made optional. The goal is to make sure you’re offering something equal to the amount of data you need. Try to be efficient and only have forms with relevant information and test different arrangements to see what visitors respond to the most.

3) Test Your Call To Action (CTA) – A call to action is your conversion. It is how you get people to do what you want them to do, and if that isn’t happening, you may need to work on your CTA. Make it descriptive, so that your visitors will know exactly what will happen if they follow the CTA,

A way to test your CTA is by changing just one word and seeing how customers respond. Unbounce found that changing the description “order information” to “get information” led to a 38.26% increase un conversions.

While these examples will get you going, if you want a more thorough guide, you’ll also want to look into Oli’s “Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing”.

 

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3 Reasons to Learn Online Marketing

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As a web designer or developer, it’s always important to understand what the client wants. That’s why it is strange how few designers and developers understand online marketing.

Understanding and implementing online marketing give any developer or designer a great advantage in the marketplace and promises much more of a long term reward than those that fail to learn about online marketing. This isn’t to say neglecting your designing or developing skills is a wise decision, but by combining your skills with online marketing, you can do three things:

1) Get more clients – When clients post ads for developers or design jobs, they often get responses detailing what features and formats the person could implement. They promise so many pages, or list how they are proficient in HTML5, jQuery, and W4C standards. This may seem like a great approach for contacting potential employers, but it has a great weakness.

Potential employers want to know what you will do for them, and what they want you to do is make more money. Employers want to hear that you will raise the number of subscribers a certain percent, or will raise their revenue. Wether you use HTML5 or jQuery is not of much importance to them.

There are plenty of good web designers that can make nice looking websites, but there are way less designers that know how to increase sales. Those that know online marketing will get the better clients, and higher rates.

2) Build Your Brand – The biggest problem for every freelancer is building a base of clients. It would be great for clients to just come to you ready to pay however much you want, but that is a fantasy. Or is it?

Building a strong personal brand online attracts clients by exhibiting your skills to them beforehand. This can be fairly difficult and requires a lot of perseverance, but there is a basic pattern. First, you build a popular blog, followed by establishing a decent social media following. Then, you participate in outside activities like conferences, and make yourself known about.

This path does two very important things for you. It establishes you as a reputable expert, and gains you tons of publicity many would pay for. When employers need work done, they go to the experts they know first, and if you’ve built a strong brand, they will know about you.

If you want to know more about building a personal brand, I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Jacob Cass.

3) Earn extra income – Freelancing is far from a stable career and anyone should be prepared for unexpected problems. That is why it is important to make yourself as financially secure as possible before the problems arrive.

One of the best options for securing your finances is to diversify your streams of income between client work and passive income. If you are already perceived as an expert in your field, creating a passive income shouldn’t be difficult. There are a slew of monetization options, such as creating and selling your own products or even simply displaying ads on your site.

It does take effort to create a product, and even more to market and sell it, but it could be extremely important in your future.

Think of it this way, if you want to run a local bakery, you have to be as good at business as you are at baking. Otherwise, the business won’t get off the ground. The same goes for creating a business online. If you want to be successful online, learn online marketing.

 

If you want to learn more about online marketing and the mistakes you can make while starting out, read more at 1stwebdesigner.

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How To Dominate Search With Content Marketing

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Google has made five recent SEO changes that will make most content marketers, writers, and bloggers quite happy. They play to your strengths. Some users may be less happy about these changes, however.

The changes were mostly made to keep more people on Google products, which isn’t a bad idea from a business perspective, but some may find the changes effect searching negatively.

The good news is, the changes were also made so that your results would be more personal by monopolizing on the fact that people are more likely to purchase something if they know their friend also likes it.

The even better news is these changes are great for anyone who makes content for a living. I will walk you through all of the changes and help you to take advantage of them.

1) Optimize personalized search – One of the biggest changes Google has made completely changed SEO by making search results personal. The results you get for a search will be different than mine, based on factors like your browsing history, the content you create and content shared by your social circles. People are finding their content more and more through social media networks and searching less.

So how can you optimize your content for personalized search? One option is you can increase your Google+ circles. Google is actively trying to get people to sign up for Google+, and in this instance, using Google+ and connecting with more people on there helps improve your search. The more people you have in your circles, the higher relevant content will show up in your searches. This also means that your circles can see your content when they search.

2) Increase social sharing – As a content creator, getting shares on social media is a great way to get your content high in the search rankings. According to a study by branded3, the more tweets leading to a URL you can get, the higher you will appear in rankings. For example, anyone that gets over 7,500 tweets (not an easy task) will appear in the top five results almost always. This type of logic most likely also works for Facebook.

As a content creator, capitalize on social sharing and you can beat your competition in the rankings. Just make sure to make the social sharing buttons obvious so that readers can find them, encourage your readers to share and try to court others with influence in your target social circles. Interview them or offer to do guest posts. Anything to establish a connection.

3) Employ semantic keyword research – Google is improving at segmenting search results, which gives you an opportunity to rank higher in verticals. This is a surefire way to get higher conversion rates because your prospective visitors are better targeted.

To take advantage of this, you’ll need to look for “advanced search” keywords. When you search, there is a way to refine results with a tool hidden in “show search tools”. Within this advanced search tool, you can look at “related searches”. Now you have semantic options you can test for the highest search volumes. There are also ways to improve your keyword list such as Google Insights for Search, which lets you narrow keywords down via categories.

4) Play with the Panda update – Google’s Panda update finally made life hard for spammers and content farms by harshly punishing sites with low quality content. This is good for all of the content creators who put hard work into long blog posts with useful content. Google even offered questions to determine the value of your content.

5) Implement the Google Authorship Mark-up – A search marketing firm proved rich snippet will increase SERP CTR and traffic. It’s that simple. Their analytics show a 150% increase when rich snippet was implemented. You might not get results quite that good, but it’s almost certain you will benefit if you implement the Google’s authorship snippet. It can be complicated, and it is slow to show results, but if you invest now you’ll see results in the not too distant future.

All of these Google changes have radically changed the SEO game, but they have made it a wonderful moment to be a content marketer. Those that put out shoddy content are being penalized, and there are all sorts of opportunities to really get your content out there.

 

For a more in depth look at author rank, read Neil Patel’s article at Quick Sprout.

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SEO Budgets Rising, Google Offers Warnings

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Google’s changes to their SEO policies have made optimization more and more difficult over the past few years. Chris Crum at WebProNews suggests that a new study from the world’s largest search marketing-specific nonprofit trade organization SEMPO reports that SEO spending is still going strong in spite of all of the free information available on the Internet.

The 72-page report, published by Econsultancy, looked at almost 900 companies and agencies and found that, “overall, the report depicts a stable industry, without making dramatic changes.” Despite significant changes in practices through the inclusion of new tools and algorithms, the survey reports that SEO has “very much the same goals in place.”

Most survey respondents increased their SEO budgets over recent years, and as low as 2% of those responding said they did not spend money on SEO. Meanwhile, the amount of agency billing for SEO services is on the rise. SEMPCO says “a significant rise in those spending less than $100k corresponds to higher numbers across the board, with the greatest increase in the $1 to $5 million range.”

One change that is particularly interesting is the statement by SEMPCO that “survey responses show a drop in the blunt objectives of driving traffic.” However, the amount of agencies citing brand reputation as their primary objective has consistently doubled annually. This is especially clear in the paid side of the industry.

What can’t be denied after the report is the value of the search marketing industry is only rising, even when faced by the rise in popularity of social media and Google algorithm updates that force sites to be less reliant on Google.

The report makes clear the “changes to the Google algorithm affects a large percent of marketers, or at least has them concerned,” and SEMPCO also notes “87% call the updates of the last 12-18 months ‘significant or highly significant'”. Most find the changes to be positive, but some legitimate brands have felt the backlash of the hunt for spam sites. Meanwhile, there are rumors of more Google updates in the future.

Thankfully, Google offers some advice on SEO, especially when beginning to look at hiring someone: “Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site.”

Google does emphasize the benefits SEO agencies can provide, such as technical advice on website development, content development, keyword research, and expertise in specific markets and geographies.

They advise “before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work.” Of course, they recommend their Webmaster Guidelines and Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web as starting points. Google also recommends hiring an SEO early in the development process. They even offer a list of questions you can ask SEOs during your hiring process.

Google’s assistance with SEO doesn’t come without it’s warnings, however. “While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEO’s have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways.”

It’s Google’s suggestion to be nervous of any SEO firms or agencies that contact you out of the blue, or one that asks you to link to them. “You should never have to link to an SEO.” They also warn that no firm can guarantee you a #1 ranking.

And if Google hasn’t already made you worn out from lists of recommendations, they also offer a list of deal-breakers when investigating an SEO, such as if the SEO owns shadow domains, puts links to their other clients on doorway pages or offers to sell keywords in the address bar.

Just because Google offers lots of advice, doesn’t mean they are making it easy to get on the first page of test results. But, they are offering resources to give your site its best shot and SEO doesn’t look to be going anywhere.

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Do You Need a Gravatar?

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We all use different ways to identify ourselves online. Most use their websites or social media pages. The problem is, once you go outside of your own domains and comment on blogs or forums, you become, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. Not so if you use a Gravatar, or ‘Globally Recognized Avatar’.

What is a Gravatar?

A Gravatar allows you to make a sort of ‘brand’ image of yourself by concisely providing a visual summation of the identity and personality of your choice.

The trick is choosing one that works best for your business, whether it is a standard head and shoulders photograph of you or your brand or product’s logo.

Everyone knows that blogs and forums are some of the most useful resources one can have to keep in touch with the trends and technical issues of their industry or areas of interest. What many may also realize is the comments sections on these posts are sometimes even more useful than reading the articles.

If you take a moment to look at comments sections, there are usually three different types of commenters.

  1. Spammers – The posters who leave generic comments that are often irrelevant.
  2. The Interested – Posters who appear to have a genuine interest in the subject, but are not usually very informed.
  3. The “Experts” – The people who post relevant and informative comments.

You will notice the Experts almost always have a Gravatar next to their names.

How Do I Create a Gravatar?

Creating a gravatar is as quick as it is easy and free. If you have a WordPress account, it’s as simple as logging in to Gravatar.com. If you don’t have a WordPress account, you can just associate your Gravatar with your email address.

After that, all there is to do is set up a profile with a suitable image and a few personal or business details. You can even add links to existing blogs, websites and social media pages.

Now, anywhere you comment, you will have your Gravatar next to it.

What Are The Benefits of Gravatars?

If you participate in comments sections frequently, you will begin to be recognized by others in the industry. This is why it is essential to have a professional looking image. This will help raise awareness of all of your pages, as well as their reputations inside the area of interest.

Considering it takes almost no time, and Gravatar doesn’t send you waves of spam e-mail, there’s really no reason not to sign up. You’ll be surprised by just how much your Gravatar does for you.

 

If you need more persuading to check out Gravatar, check out Alistair Harris’ article at ClickThrough.

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The Trouble With Scaling and Technical Debt

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Technical debt is a common issue in the start-up ecosystem, and it has been well discussed. When scaling your product and engineering, sacrifices must be made for the sake of speed, but they almost always cause problems later. What most start-ups fail to realize is that this problem occurs in almost every aspect and form of business practice.

Rand Fishkin uses a story to illustrate this point. A man named Heaton sees a job ad on a website that looks perfect for his skill set. He applies and, 4 days later, gets an email asking to talk over the phone. The hiring manager loves Heaton and emails him 2 days later inviting him to meet with the whole team. 10 days later, Heaton meets for a full interview and is introduced to 4 of the 6 other teammates. The other 2 are out, so Heaton is scheduled to come back 3 days later. When he comes in, he gets a written offer.

Unfortunately, Heaton had interviewed at a big corporation the day after he had applied for this opportunity with a start-up. They immediately sent him an offer with plenty of time to consider. On the last day he was allowed by this offer, Heaton accepted. This day happened to be the day before he was offered a job with the start-up, which Heaton would have preferred to work at. Heaton assumes any company that takes 23 days to get back in touch for an important position already has too many issues anyhow.

In reality, they are hiring because they have a huge issue. There’s no HR or hiring function, so they had to ask the CEO to make the hire, in addition to an already difficult future. Most in this position haven’t had to fire before, so they may not realize how important it is to be fast with responses when hiring. Also, each individual only feels like they’re taking a couple days with their responses. But these few days individually add up quickly, which led to Heaton’s problems.

Only after losing Heaton does the start-up realize it has this issue and tries to solve it.

Problems like technical debt happen in every aspect of business where a start-up can take a shortcut. Not every problem goes unaddressed or scales badly, but enough issues do create an inflection point that costs money.

If you are a start-up or are joining one, be ready for these types of problems. It is always difficult to try to fix problems once you are already moving, but you will have to. Also, if you are interested in a start-up from the outside, empathize with their problems and know they may not be as messed up as it appears. They may just be dealing with start-up debt.

 

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How To Fix Common Technical SEO Problems

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Technical SEO can be interesting, but no one likes coming across the same problems time and time again. That’s why it’s shocking how many websites are struggling with the same issues.

Here are some of the most frequent issues that can found while doing a site audit. We also have the solutions, so you can be prepared if you come across any of these issues.

1) Uppercase vs. Lowercase URLs – This happens most often on sites that use .NET. The server is configured to respond to URLs with uppercase letters and doesn’t redirect or rewrite to lowercase versions. This issue is slowly disappearing because search engines are improving a lot at recognizing canonical versions and disregarding copies. Just because it is going away doesn’t mean this issue should be ignored. Search engines still make mistakes doing this, so don’t rely on them.

Luckily, there is a an easy fix for this issue in the form of a URL rewrite module, which solves the issue on IIS 7 servers. There is a convenient option inside the interface that allows you to enforce lowercase URLs. If you do this, a rule is added to the web config file and this problem is gone.

2) Multiple Versions of the Homepage – If you are auditing a .NET website, go check to see if www.example.com/default.aspx exists. Most likely, it does. The page is a duplicate that search engines often find via navigation or XML sitemaps. Other platforms will instead make URLs like www.example.com/index.html or www.example.com/home. Most contemporary search engines automatically fix the problem, but why not make sure there isn’t an issue to be fixed?

The best way to solve this problem begins with doing a crawl of the site and exporting it into a CSV filtered by META title column. Do a search for the homepage title and you’ll quickly spot duplicates of your homepage. An easy fix for these duplicates is to add a 301 redirect version of the page that directs to the correct version.

You can also do a crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog to find internal links that point to the duplicate pages. Then, you can edit the duplicate pages so they direct to the correct URL. Having internal links that go via 301 can cost you some link equity.

3) Query Parameters Added to the End of URLs – This issue is most common on database driven eCommerce websites because there are tons of attributes and filtering options. This means often you will find URLs like www.example.com/product-category?color=12. In that example, the product is filtered by color. Filtering like this can be good for users, but bad for searches. Unless your customers do not search for the specific product using color, the URL is probably not the best landing page to target with keywords.

Another issue that tends to show up on tons of crawls of sites is when these parameters are combined together. The worst is when the parameters can be combined in different orders but return the same content, such as:

www.example.com/product-category?color=12&size=5 

www.example.com/product-category?size=5&color=12

Because both of these have different paths but return the same content, they are seen as duplicate content. It is important to remember Google allocates crawl budget based on PageRank. Make sure your budget is being used efficiently.

To begin fixing this issue, you need to address which pages you want Google to crawl and index. Make this decision based on keyword research and cross reference all database attributes with your core target keywords. You need to figure out what attributes are keywords used to find products. In figuring this out, it is possible to find high search volume for certain keywords, for example “Nike” = “Running Shoes.” If you find this, you want a landing page for “Nike Running Shoes” to be crawlable and indexable. Make sure the database attribute has an SEO friendly URL and ensure that the URLs are part of the navigation structure of your site so that a good flow of PageRank users can find the pages easily.

The next step depends on whether you want the specific attribute indexed or not. If the URLs are not already indexed, add the URL structure to your robots.txt file and test your regex properly to make sure you don’t block anything accidentally. Also, make sure you use the Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster tools. Remember, however, if the URLs are already indexed, adding them to your robots.txt file will not remove them.

If the URLs are indexed, unfortunately you are in need of the rel=canonical tag. If you inherit one of these situations and are not able to fix the core of the issue, the rel=canonical tag covers the issue in hope that it can be solved later. You’ll want to add this tag to the URLs you do not want indexed and point to the most relevant URL you do want indexed.

4) Soft URL Errors – A soft 404 is a page that looks like a 404 but returns a HTTP status code 200. If this happens, the user sees something resembling “Sorry the page you requested cannot be found”, but the code 200 tells search engines that the page is still working. This disconnect can be the source of the issue with pages being crawled and indexed when you don’t want them to be. A soft 404 also means real broken pages can’t be found.

Thankfully, this problem has a very easy fix for any developer who can set the page to return a 404 status code instead of a 200. You can use Google Webmaster tools to find any soft 404s Google has detected. You can also perform a manual check by going to a broken URL and seeing what status code is returned.

5) 302 Redirects Instead of 301 Redirects – Because users won’t be able to tell there is even a problem, this is a pretty easy problem for developers to make. A 301 redirect is permanent. Search engines recognize this and send link equity elsewhere. A 302 redirect is temporary and search engines will expect the original page to return soon, which leaves link equity where it is.

Find 302s by using a deep crawler like Screaming Frog. It allows you to filter by 302s, which you can then check individually. You can then ask your developers to change any that should be 301s.

6) Broken or Outdated Site Maps – XML sitemaps may not be essential, but they are very useful to search engines that make sure they can find all the URLs that matter. XML sitemaps help show the search engines what is important. Letting your sitemap become outdated causes them to contain broken links and miss any new content and URLs. Keeping sitemaps updated is especially important for big sites that add new pages frequently. Bing also penalizes sites with too many issues in their sitemaps.

Audit your current sitemap for broken links. After, speak to your developers about updating your XML sitemap and make it dynamic so that it updates frequently. How frequently depends on your resources, but doing this will save you a lot of trouble later.

It is very possible you will come across other issues while doing an audit, but, hopefully, if you come across any of these, you are now prepared to fix the problem.

 

For more Technical SEO Problems, read this article by Paddy Moogan at SEOmoz.

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