With the end of each year I do SEO housekeeping to make sure all my websites stay clean and neat for the coming year. It helps make the old technical issues get taken care of and improve my sites crawling, indexing and internal linking. I make a list of things you can simply do yourself and get ready for 2014. Have a view and feel free to let me know if you have any questions.
Update Footer/Sidewide Information
Update website & copyright information on the footer section. This should be taken care of by EMS itself but if not, make sure you contact the dev team to have the info updated.
Set up Google Authorship
If you haven’t done this, please set it up ASAP. If you think you did, go http://www.google.com/
URL Reclamation
Do a quick search on your event name (maybe with year or IDGA in the query) to see if there are still any old events/pages in the SERP. If so, redirect/ canonicalize them to the new address.
Set up Goal/ Value in Google Analytics
For those who don’t know that you can (sort of) get a dollar value for each of your marketing campaigns via Google Analytics, log in to your website’s Google Analytics profile and ensure the goal/ value setting is done properly.
How-to: Admin >> Account >> Property >> View (Profile) >> Goal >> assign estimate dollar values for Extra content download and PDF download. This setup will later on allow you to see the conversion value on the dashboard.
Clean up 404, redirected or outdated links.
Find where 404 (broken) and redirected links exist on your website. Clean up those links by updating or removing them altogether
Tools:
https://www.google.com/
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/
http://www.screamingfrog.co.
Update Campaign/ Event URLs
Will the URL of your event in 2014 be different? If so, update the website link you placed on other blogs, directories or micro sites. Or at least make a list of them so you know where to go when the website address is actually changed.
Update Campaign Parameter Tracking
Will you do anything new to your email, marketing or paid campaigns in 2014? Maybe apply different custom url parameters to your new campaigns so you will know how they perform as well as keep tracking the impact of the old ones.
A typical parameter tracking code looks like: http://example.com/?utm_
Update Event Tracking Code
Sort of like the URL parameter tacking but they are mostly on the website and are used to track a specific action or the outbound traffic. Again if the links change, make sure the event tracking codes are updated too.
A typical event tracking code looks like: onclick=”_gaq.push([‘_
Internal Linking
Review each page on your event website to make sure there are at least 3 internal links from other pages.
Run Backlink Check
Run a quick competition backlink analysis to identify potential link partners for your own sites, then add them to your 2014 link request list.
Tools:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.
http://www.majesticseo.com/
https://ahrefs.com/