Spring cleaning is an annual ritual to get our proverbial houses in order. Well, this spring why not get your SEO house in order?

Making your site Search Engine Friendly is always a topic that generates interest. Marketers face several challenges putting their best SEO foot forward. Often, large websites toting hundreds or thousands of pages have a hard time maintaining optimization across so much content. Let's explore some simple tips to clean-up your SEO efforts.

Today's Topics Include:

·         Site setup in terms of levels or "depth"

·         Internal Page Rank Distribution

·         External Link Management

·         Finding content search engines cannot read

Let's start with the architecture of your website. One key element is  "site depth".  Site depth refers to how many clicks it takes to navigate a website from the home page to content on internal pages. The more clicks it takes to get to the meat of the site, the less those pages will get attention by search engine crawlers. The goal should be 3 clicks at most to reach content. You can combat this issue on large sites with some techniques like adding footer links, using HTML site maps which include category maps, adding side menus and incorporating horizontal links- which are between page links to increase the flow and usability of the site.

Moving on, let's discuss improving internal page rank flow. Some routes to doing this include taking out unnecessary or unused categories. Also, linking  to the most valuable pages from home and doing that with text links is even better. Also utilizing keyword-rich internal anchor text will help your internal pages get the attention they deserve by showing the search engines what content they can find there. 

When it comes to external link management, pages which return  404 or 302 status errors can be fixed with a 301-redirect. Improving the pages anchor text with keyword rich phrasing will also help.  

Avoid unreadable content at all costs! Search engines are pro at reading text in HTML but they get confused when there is too much Flash, pictures and Javascript content to contend with. Test for readable content by: using a text based browser like Lynx, use an online search engine emulator tool or try to browse your site with Flash, Cookies and Javascript disabled.

Another problem for large websites is they often have numerous references to the same page www vs. non-www, index.html vs  /. The process of picking(consolidating) the best URL is often referred to as canonicalization. Sites which consolidate links, rather than divide them will rank higher with search engines.  

If you can attack these problems this Spring your website will rank higher and be substantially easier to find- putting you in front of your customers more often everyday!