Cars need tune ups and airplanes go into the hanger to get optimized for the next flight. If you are a web owner that has the “upload it and leave it” mentality, consider adding a weekly or monthly tune up to your website. Ten to Fifteen minutes here and there can only do one thing–make you more successful.

1. Start small with the meta information.

a. Examine your Title meta tag on each page. Do they describe the page contents? Do they contain the right keywords to drive traffic to that page? Is at least one part of the Title geo-specific? Example, “Attorney, Los Angeles, CA” and not just “Attorney” or “Lawyer” or “My Law Firm.”

b. Examine your Description meta tag. Make sure that each page, if it is at all possible, has a different meta tag description. Google does not like repeated information.

2. Check your links.

Use a free online program to make sure you don’t have any broken links. Go to your favorite search engine and type in “free link checker” and use one that looks good to you.

3. Do a little marketing.

Go to your favorite search engine and search for something you do or sell. Let’s say you are a dentist. Perform two different kinds of searches, global and geo-specific.

Example: 1. “dentist,” global and 2. “dentist, (city)”, geo-specific. Examine the backlinks to make sure that you are also on the same business directories as the top ranked websites. You do this quickly using a “backlink checker.” You can easily find one of your choice through a quick search engine search.

Steps 1, 2, and 3 can be repeated daily, weekly, monthly–whatever your schedule allows. The next 2 steps go a little deeper into your maintenance plan.

4. Google Analytics.

It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s extremely useful. If you aren’t paying an SEO company to handle your website, you should definitely take advantage of this amazing tool.

You sign up for it here: http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Google will give you a unique code to put on each page you want to track. You don’t need to be a programmer to figure it out. It’s just a few lines of script that you paste into your webpage exactly where Google shows you to do it.

It really is as easy as it sounds. And what do you get? You find out how many people are visiting your website, what keywords brought them to your website, what websites referred them to your website, where they are from, how much time they spent on your website and much more.

This is an amazing free treasure trove of information. You will find out if the people visiting your website are, in fact, the type of visitor you are targeting. If not, all you have to do is tweak your Title meta tag and your content to let the search engine know, for example: you want people who were searching for “logo design” not “graphic design” or “child therapist” not “couples therapy.”

5. Alexa.

Alexa monitors traffic levels for websites. While arguably a flawed system, it is still used as a measuring stick to gauge your website.

Why should you care?

Let’s say you own a flower store in Boston. You look up your competitor and find that they have an Alexa ranking of 79,000 and you have one of 4,500,000. This is a quick indicator that THEY and not YOU are getting all the flower shop web traffic in the area. Additionally, the more traffic you get, the more likely your organic search engine results will go higher. Marketing activities that increase web visitors will give you a better Alexa ranking.

Across the board, SEO experts agree that if you download the “Alexa Toolbar” and visit your website once a day, encourage friends and colleagues to download the tool bar and visit each other’s websites–that this will increase your Alexa ranking, too. It’s a simple thing to do, but don’t expect dramatic results. You can also flaunt your url in Alexa forums, but the best use of your time is simply to try to get targeted visitors to your website through standard marketing channels.

That is always the bottom line.

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About the Author: Matt Chansky provides graphic design for businesses of every shape and size, including startup businesses.

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