Like many owners of recruiting websites, we’re going through a detailed review of our content, marketing messages, imagery and more. First, we want to make sure we are putting our best foot forward when we engage with prospective members and other parts of our audience. Second, we want to ensure we are following good SEO practices and offering a great experience for site visitors. Some actions will be easier (and faster!) to implement than others. Here are a few housekeeping items we’re working on – now is a great time to check these out on your own site as well.
- Broken Links – Broken links are not only a poor user experience, they’re also a signal that Google uses to help evaluate the overall quality of a site. Unfortunately, checking for bad links is probably not a top-of-mind priority for many website managers. And if your site has been around a while, and you blog or otherwise regularly create new content, you’re almost certain to have some broken links somewhere on your site. You can use Google Analytics to review your site for broken links, or you can look at a tool like Dead Link Checker, which offers free and paid options.
- Use Snippet / Read More Options – Recruiting websites that include a blog (or blog-style architecture) can inadvertently offer a less-than-desirable user experience on the ‘home’ or ‘category’ pages if each complete post runs right into the next. Some site designs feature a tile or grid layout that can show just a snippet from each post, or you may be able to insert a “read more” tag into each post that allows you to manually create a snippet. This is a good way for site visitors to easily see a broad variety of the available content without endless scrolling.
- Comments / Comment Spam – Believe it or not, comments on your website can also impact your SEO efforts. If you allow comments, I strongly recommend using something to monitor comment spam. We use Akismet, which removes the vast majority of spam content and puts everything else in a moderation queue for human intervention. Another option is to require the use of a CAPTCHA form before comments are allowed. You’ll also need to scrub your comments for dead links. You may want to turn off the ability (if you have it) for site visitors to include links in their comments.
There are lots of other items that should be part of a semi-regular website audit. While these items aren’t the sexiest, they’re easy to fix. This may even be something you can outsource so you can spend your time on more valuable activities. What’s your best website housekeeping tip? Add a comment below.