5 Routine SEO house keeping tasks to check site health regularly

Once you’ve either achieved your desired results or are closer to it, its quite natural for us to give away and celebrate. Which is okay with less competitive sites but when it comes to heavy competition, there is little room for rest.

SEO House Keeping is an inevitable process that comes at various levels of SEO implementation, and works best if done regularly. So, what are the top 5 SEo housekeeping tasks ? Let’s see.

1. Check for competition changes on SERPs.

The reason why you’re doing SEO house keeping is because your competition is doing something similar.They would be doing all that they can, improvisations, SEO tweaks, Link building and all that’s possible to improve their ranks and even if you’re on the top, if they out perform you, you end up being the loser. So keep a constant watch on your competition, especially the guys who are SEO friendly and are trying out new things.

2. Check for crawling errors.

One of the most common errors on well established sites. Sometimes even when content gets published, due to glitches like sitemap publishing or server downtimes, search engines won’t crawl your latest pages. Seemingly a simple error, this can prove fatal, particularly in the case of news based websites where time is an important factor.
You can keep a check on this by keeping a watch on the Google Webmasters tool, crawling frequency details.

3. Check for sitemap health.

Another common mistake, when sitemaps gets screwed up by either not publishing properly, or a style sheet parse error or something similar. Sitemaps are important for growing websites, in fact they could prove as the only thing that will guide search engines to your site. So monitor them closely for errors.

4. Check for Google site index number fluctuations.

If there are any glitches with Google, it would soon reflect on the site index. Glitches like duplicate page issues or penalties would appear as a reduction in the number  of pages shown as indexed on Google. Keeping a constant check on the number of pages indexed on Google (with the site: operator) will give you a good clue of the general health. I’d say if there are heavy fluctuations in the number of pages indexed, then there’s probably something you need to worry about.

5. Check for broken links

its human to misplace links. The only method possible to keep them at bay is to constantly check for broken links and fix them as soon as you find it. There are several SEO tools available to check for broken links. Use them and keep broken links to a minimum. The less the number of broken links, the better.

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