How to clean up your online act (and why you need to)

 

Today is actually Clean Up Your Room Day, so it felt like a good day to think about the space your business inhabits online.

I’m not talking about getting rid of dodgy high school pictures on your Facebook page, but about the things that you skipped doing in the first place. Why should you do it? Two solid reasons: making things better for your customers and making things better for Google.

No prizes for guessing which is most important!

Here’s the things I’d be prioritising in your clean up:

Check for broken links

 

 

Broken links are frustrating, in terms of not being able to get where you wanted to go, and also the impression they give of quality, or lack of. This should be relatively easy to do, as there are plugins and websites that you can run your site through. I use Broken Link Checker, which emails when a link becomes broken. It’s quick to keep on top of, and simple. Why wouldn’t you do it?

 

Clean up your spelling and writing

 

 

I know, I’m slightly obsessed with spelling and grammar. But then so are Google these days. And some of your customers will share my obsession as well. Again, it’s a potential measure of quality in their minds. Or it could just be that you’ve written some complete gobbledegook by accident or it’s full of jargon.

I covered how to check over your work in this post here. I am a big fan of Grammarly as a support, but there is nothing like good human proofreading.

 

Optimise your photos

 

 

There are two key things here. Have you optimised the size of your photos for fast loading? Sometimes if you upload something straight from the camera on your phone, or some online photo providers, then they’ll be full high resolution images. Great if someone wants to print them out, not so good for fast loading speeds. You should be able to check this by sorting your media library by size. If it’s in MB, you’ve got an issue!

The next step is making sure you’ve optimised the images for onpage SEO. Did you rename your image to something appropriate? If you’ve left them as something like IMG_006 then you’re missing out on the opportunity to boost your visibility with search engines. It’s not the only thing you want to do for search engine optimisation, but why miss out on the opportunity? Work through your most popular posts first.

 

Keep, redo, delete

 

 

If your blog is over a year old, then it’s probably time to review your posts and make some hard decisions. As hard as it may seem, some posts have reached the end of their usefulness. And you probably need to make the call to delete them. When you’ve slaved over creating a post then it’s hard to think about deleting it. But this is business, don’t get sentimental now.

Some posts need updating, which might mean just updating some information within it, or rewriting 90% of it. If you want a good guide to this, then I really recommend Yoast (who I use for SEO) as they have great easy to read guides on all kinds of SEO subjects.

 

If you only did these four things then it’s a great start. A bit like tidying the house, just getting started is key. What will you do to clear up online?