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Top 4 Problems You Can Fix to Cleanup Your Website
By Sandi Andersen and Janet Andersen

Pretty much all sites need a small amount of housekeeping to be done every so often, so make sure you read this whole article so that you don't miss anything that you can easily do to save your site's search results. A small amount now will save you plenty later.

So let's look for some of the little things that if left to their own devises can become large issues.

Check your site for broken links:

Check your site frequently for broken links, now I am talking both internal links on your website and external links from other sites pointing to yours. Now you can always click on each link in your website (not fun), use a Firefox extension called "Link Evaluator" which will check all of the links on each page of your site as a single operation (page by page), or search for a free or commercial spidering tool, which will inspect the links on your entire site with just one request.

External incoming links can be checked by doing a Yahoo search (Google is not as precise for this) to see what sites have indexed pages pointed to your site. You do this search by typing in "link:" in the front of your domain name or domain and page name. Go through these results confirming each page has your link. If your link is missing contact the site owner and nicely ask for a link back to your site, they should have no trouble doing this as they used to link to you.

Check for Title tags which are absent or set as default:

As you most likely already know, the page title is a large factor that the search engines use to conclude what subject matter your web page is about. The problem is when you use a program such as Dreamweaver to start writing a new page and forget to change the default title, or if you hand code a new page and completely forget to include a title tag.

You can check for your pages (which are indexed) that are using the default title tag by doing a search such as "allintitle:untitled document site:Put Your Domain Name Here".

Duplicate Titles:

While you are checking your pages for absent and default titles, why don't you also check for duplicate titles? When you use the same title tag on a large number of pages (which is never a good idea) well then you are in essence making your web pages compete against all the others with the same title. Locating the pages on your site can be simply done using basically the same process as above. Just replace the untitled document portion with the duplicate title you were using.

Check your Meta Descriptions:

I am certain you know that the meta description tag is hidden text which is found in the head section of your pages. Sometimes the content in this tag is used as the descriptions for your page in the search engine results page, so you want to be sure to make it describe the page's contents as accurately as possible. Being sure to not just duplicate this description across your entire site. I am only talking about the meta description tag here and not the meta keywords tag which has no real use in today's SEO so it is best not to use it at all.

Now you know some of the less complicated issues you can fix on your site. These problems may be harming your ranking in the search engines. Deal with them now before they become too big to manage. As your site grows these problems will just become bigger, so it is best to fix them now.

About the Author:
Do you want to learn the secrets that will help you make more money online, and easier? Read my review on a simple system to make money online by going to http://www.asseenonlinereviews.com/?p=18