SEO Site Clean-Up for 2014

The New Year is approaching, and it’s a good time to really take a hard look at your website. Is your site truly ready for 2014?

There’s certainly no way of knowing what Google will decide to change in 2014. However, you can execute a thorough clean up of your site, one that brings your site into alignment with the changes Google has already made.

Eliminate overlapping content.

“Old school” SEO encouraged the creation of pages of content that might have overlapped. This is because site owners were trying to capture specific SEO phrases. This led to somewhat repetitive content that wasn’t necessarily as in-depth or useful as it could have been.

With the advent of hummingbird it’s safe to say that if you have three “topic” pages on your site that all say basically the same thing that you’re going to want to take two of them down. Better yet, combine them so that all of the information is presented on one, good, solid, comprehensive page. Look for places where you can “dig in” to the subject matter a bit more and update your content to provide a resource that offers site visitors more of your unique perspective.

And if you have any pages that contain awkward “keyword phrasing,” get rid of them now. Search is now conversational, so you have full permission to be conversational right along with it.

Once you’ve done this you can begin using long tail keyword research to develop new pieces of content. The long tail is now where you should be focusing the majority of your efforts.

Consider adopting Schmitz site architecture.

In his 2014 SEO Playbook, Tom Schmitz suggested a 4-point content strategy or site architecture that replaces the old “keyword tree” structure that so many webmasters of the past attempted.

The plan revolved around four types of content that most sites should be using: product/service/sales content, customer support content, company information content and education, information, and resources content. This is a good strategy because it creates a website that includes just about everything a customer would like to know about you, while allowing you to keep right on building authority content that builds trust between you and the customer.

The plan also gets you thinking about what customers need out of you when they visit your website, which is honestly a higher level of thinking than demanding to know how you can get the search engines to send you some love. If you do the former you’ll typically get the latter.

Get mobile friendly.

If you’re not already mobile friendly the time has come. You should strive to create a site that looks great regardless of the device that is accessing it. Do it fast enough and you  might just get a competitive edge--98% of sites still aren’t using responsive design. Google also wants to see sites that load up on a smart phone in less than one second. (Yes, you read that right). Make sure your site is following all of Google’s guidelines in this regard.

If you’ve been doing your own web design and you’re struggling with the principles of responsive design you might need to pony up and hire a professional this year. In business, there are always places where attempting to cut costs may become more harmful than helpful. This year, responsive web design is that place. You literally cannot afford to produce any other kind of site.

Take advantage of Google Author or Google Publisher.

The rumor of Author or Publisher becoming one of Google’s primary ranking factors has been swirling around for long enough that it’s probably safe to predict that Google will turn its attention to making this change soon enough. After all, everyone’s had fair warning and a good bit of time to build up their author profiles.

If you haven’t heeded that warning it’s time to do so now. You want to build as much of your author/publisher authority as possible before Google ultimately makes the change. After all, stamping a name and a face on content is a tremendous way to fight spam. Not only is “authorless” content going to be treated as if it is less relevant, but poorly written or spammy content that does have an author could threaten that author’s reputation. These are powerful incentives to fill the web with the kind of good, insightful content Google has been urging people to create all along.

It’s a year of opportunity!

If “old school” SEO has never been particularly intuitive for you then 2014 is actually going to be a year of great opportunities for you. If you are the type of person who has always wanted to focus more on creating outstanding content than fiddling with keywords you’ll be happy to know that the new algorithm updates actually favors content creators just like you.