Regardless of how successful your internet business was in 2010, the start of a new year is always a good time to take a look at your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts and review what worked well and see in which areas there’s room for improvement. Basically, it’s time to perform a checkup of your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy to set your business up for a move to the next level as far as your results and overall success are concerned in the coming year.

Take Away The SEO Barriers To Your Success

The first part of the checkup is to remove the barriers to SEO success within your web site. If there are errors on your site’s pages that prevent the search engines from crawling your entire site, this can harm your rankings in the search engines.

The most common problems that prevent pages from being crawled are broken links, so it’s important to track them down and at least reduce them by either building the pages that don’t exist or creating a 301 redirect to an existing destination. A useful free tool for doing this is W3C Link Checker.

Eliminate Duplicate Content

Another problem area is duplicate content, normally found in such areas as title tags and product descriptions. These can be located using tools like Xenu Link Sleuth (detects broken links but data can be exported to help find duplicate content) and Yahoo Site Explorer.

Make Sure Your Site Is Relevant

One thing that can really mess up your site’s rankings is irrelevant content. Google’s Webmaster Tools can show you the most relevant keywords for your site’s topic, from which you can develop focused content.

Another option is to develop a tag cloud focused on relevant keywords, using such tools as TagCrowd.com.

Keep An Eye On Your Site’s Rankings

It’s essential that you know where your web site ranks for a given keyword so you can tell whether the changes you are making are working or not. Again, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a set of reports called Search Queries, which shows how your site ranks for various queries.

Reviewing the above Search Engine Optimisation factors on a monthly, rather than an annual, basis will help you keep your internet business on track as far as your SEO strategies are concerned and at least maintain, if not improve, your site’s rankings.

A UK internet marketing consultant is well versed in all aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and can provide you with the expertise you need to make sure your SEO checkups are thorough and effective.

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