Meeting onsite SEO requirements is very important before you even start the process of inputting content into your site. Too many people find out the hard way if their site crashes, they get hacked, or any number of ways data is lost.
What is the point of putting in a bunch of content into your site if you do not have simple safeguards in place? You want to make very sure that once you start inputting content into your site that it is ready to do so in the most efficient manner.
Grandfather Father Son Backup Definition
A grandfather father son backup (known colloquially as “the grandfather backup”) is a series of steps made to capture data on your site to save it. Depending on your schedule, grandfather backups of your site happen once a month. Father backups are weekly. Son backups could be daily or alternating days.
The whole point to this is: if something goes wrong, there are enough copies of the backup made so the data is not completely lost. Too many people rely on a simple backup system; this is especially bad for websites with a high amount of SEO images. But, what happens if the glitch is in an update patch or is a virus that wasn’t detected for several weeks? It is frustrating for people to need to start their content over because they do not know what is causing the site to fail.
SEO XML Sitemap WordPress Requirement
Just like a road map shows you how to get from point A to point B, and XML site map shows the crawlers how to examine your site from point A to point B. This is a step that too many businesses miss, and then they wonder why they have no sales for their site.
Consider this for a moment: If I told you that I wanted you to come to my house, but I did not give you an address, how would you find my house? This is the same for the search engines. How do you expect them to find your wonderful content if they have no clue where to look in the first place.
Get A WordPress RSS Feed Plugin Now!
You also need to prepare your content for syndication. This requires a RSS feed that is based off your XML sitemap. Basically, this allows for others to see your content and to use it as part of a news reel for items in the industry.
Not only does the author of that other blog see you pages and posts when they are published, their audience sees your posts, too via their rss feed app. Take the time to learn how to subscribe to an RSS feed, then add RSS feeds related to your industry. This is a simple step of gaining new customers and expertise that new businesses miss out on!
Robots.Txt File Tips
There is a file within your WordPress site called “robots.txt”. This is a file that gives instructions about the layout of the site by letting the site know what to exclude before uploading. This is an important file when working with your site.
While you are making big changes to your site, you will want this file set so that the entire website is not crawlable to avoid potential 404 errors. And when the website is ready to go live again, the robots.txt file must be changed to reflect the permission to crawl the site again. This simple SEO maintenance error turns your website into a liability rather than an asset!
Dublin Core WordPress Fails
Things that do damage to your site is old technologies, like Dublin Core WordPress elements and images that use flash. These drastically slow down your site, and it lead to all sorts of conflicts that you just do not want on your site.
Essentially, the best Dublin Core SEO advice is to just not use Dublin Core at all! It is a good thing that the new installations of WordPress have ditched these things, but some website developers just hang onto these old relics.
Why Not To Use Free Flash Graphics For Sites
The same goes with flash. Other than WordPress, there is a big website company that uses flash as its main engine. It is sad to say, but those website owners just have nothing more than a fancy business card as the crawlers cannot examine the text inside flash vector graphics. Leave the flash for games, and do not use it for your page or post content.
WordPress HTML Tricks To Know
Have you ever come across something that looks weird like %20outsourcing20% when reading through articles? This happens from time to time when the websites are not set up to read special characters or commands.
Websites should use semantic HTML, English language, and the utf-8 character set for all English-language websites. The new versions of WordPress already use these, so that is not a worry for newer websites.
Check Your Plugin Menu WordPress Backend
One of the biggest damages that is done to the site is when a plug-in is allowed to lapse for too many versions. Plug-ins should be kept up-to-date; however, updating any plug-in is risky. That is why plug-ins should be updated one at a time to take advantage of the data backup schedule. If done correctly, there is little chance of long-term downtime from your site.
Another place that causes page and post conflict is when javascript is used for the functions of the site. There is too much spam that uses javascprit, so many users simply ignore any javascripted data with plug-in that actually block it from their view. Essentially, using java script as part of the function for the site will be seen as broken content to your users.
A last place that causes surprise conflicts is the misuse of jQuery libraries. Some plug-ins take shortcuts and use only a small portion of a jQuery library for their software. This can create duplicate copies of the same instructions which sometimes throws the system for a loop! The system will get confused which instructions to follow when there are jQuery conflicts.
Do You Have All The Requirements?
It is not a surprise that building a website is complicated. This is actually technology that has been tweaked and re-shaped for decades now. The point of this article is to really instill the importance of doing it right the first time in order to save you many headaches down the road.
The next two weeks of posts are going to focus on expanding this one post: Onsite SEO Step By Step. If you have been following along with this tutorial you should have: keyword research results, keyword strategy and map, content already created. The next step is to move to the Onsite SEO Title Tips.
How would you go about maintaining your data for your website? Please comment below!
