By John Eberhard

In a recent article I talked about some aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), such as keyword research, putting metatag titles and descriptions on all your pages, building up links to your site, plus handling page loading speed.

In this article I’m going to cover some other aspects of SEO that are also important.

Bad Link Removal

Just as it is important to build up the number of links to your site, it is also an issue that, if your site has been around for a while, it probably has built up a number of what Google considers bad or “toxic” links. It is important to periodically go through your links and identify the “toxic” links. Most of these will be from sites overseas. Then you can send this list to Google and request that they “disavow” these bad links. (It’s possible that after you tell them to disavow the bad links, that the list will self-destruct in 5 seconds. But I’m not at liberty to confirm or deny that.)

My view is that you should have your bad links removed twice a year.

Business Directory Submissions

There are about 50 business directories where it is worthwhile to set up listings on those sites for your business. This is a one-time thing but it should be checked every year or two.

Competitor Analysis

This is where you analyze the online presence of 3-5 of your top competitors. You look at their website, what metatags they are using, how well they rank on the top keywords that you want to rank for, what sites they have gotten links from linking back to their site, and what they are doing on social media. Minimally this gives you ideas on how to improve your own marketing.

SEO Audit

There are a number of online tools that will perform an SEO audit of your site, which then identifies any SEO problems that can then be addressed. I use a tool called https://seranking.com which is one of the better ones. This should be done quarterly.