Below is a list of simple tasks that you should be performing on a weekly basis to keep your site on top in the search results.

Create & Manage Backlinks

Creating and managing your backlinks involves making sure that none of your current links are dead or broken, and to see if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about or didn’t sign off on. Check any unknown domains for poor reputation and/or bad reviews. Another good idea is internal linking and optimizing your anchor links.

Majestic is one of the greatest tools for analyzing your backlinks. You can get a brief overview for free and also offers paid plans with more in-depth information at a reasonable cost.

Don’t go overboard and add a link every time you see a vertical keyword, but if the context is right you should definitely make the link! Google likes good link structure. If your site has pages that consists of a large number of links (100 links or more), you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is irrelevant. Also, make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled with content-rich keywords to reflect the page that they link to.

Spend Ample Time in Webmaster Tools

It’s generally a good idea to keep your sitemap and content up-to-date and registering your website with Google & Bing Webmaster Tools are essential to doing both. Both systems provide a good amount of raw data and beneficial tools to keep your site healthy and fully able to be indexed. If you make significant changes to a page, make sure to “fetch” the page so that your new content gets indexed promptly. Spending ample time in Webmaster Tools is essential for your site’s search rank position (SERP).

Remember the Character Limitations

Every SEO specialist does it from time to time; we make a Title, Description or Heading tag that’s either too short or too long. Always remember the character limitations! Double-check your URLs, Title/Descriptions and Heading tags to make sure you’re not being truncated by the major search engines.

Regular Content Check

Dynamic content must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at inopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a sub-par dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site, all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Content is Still King

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding new quality content as updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Keeping your content fresh is crucial and, if you follow the patterns of ensuring content quality, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can ensure your visitor’s satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count and search engine rankings.

Link Reputation Matters

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link back in exchange. Full backlinks are the primary goal and gives both domains a boost in reputation and rank. Even if they offer to pay you, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be relative to your site’s content for you to be ranked higher in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks

Some sites use robots.txt to disavow search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page.

You should also check to see if the website linking to you is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these sites – better to have them disavowed/banned and out of the way.

Watch Your URL Count

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 100 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links thinking they’re helping their rank, but it only has the effect of making them look like link farms which are not allowed. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.