We have seen many companies over the years use their Internet server as an internal file-sharing network of sorts. Most of them wrongly assumed that the file could not be found since it wasn’t a “web page”. However, Google indexed a multitude of files and using the filetype: command makes it quite easy for your competitors to find them. Let us show you an example:

internet marketing budget filetype:xls site:gov

Typing that into Google will bring up almost 300 pages. These will all be Microsoft Excel files that include the word/s marketing budget within the spiderable text and/or title.

The first result happens to be just what we were looking for: The Whitehouse marketing budget. No, we’re not picking on George Bush. That’s my other blog . We wanted to show you what not to do without using another company as an example, and the Whitehouse is not likely to litigate on this entry.

You can view the cached version or click on the link to download the Excel file.

Most of the habitual SEOs I know will have completed the tasks on this list many times over by the end of the month. But even the most neurotic search marketers overlook their housecleaning duties sometimes. A look at our XML Site Map shows that First Page Fitness is as guilty of this as anyone (it usually needs to be updated).

Use this list as a monthly reminder. Print it out and tack it to the wall, or bookmark the permalink and set a reminder to come back once each month.

The Monthly SEO Housecleaning Task List

Check Your Google Sitemaps (now Webmaster Tools)
Is Google encountering any problems while visiting the website? Is your robots.txt file working properly? Use the tools they have available for keyword research and site diagnostics.

Weed Out Your 404s
Check your analytics program for pages that are producing 404 errors. Analyze these errors to determine why users are being sent to a page that does not exist. Usually this is from a broken link, either internally or externally. You can fix internal links easily. External links can be fixed by requesting the referring website to update the link, or applying a 301 redirect to the non-existent page that they are linking to.

Review Your Indexed Pages
Run a site: command on all major search engines to ensure that:

• Your pages are still indexed
• They are being re-indexed regularly (check the date by visiting the Cached link)
• The correct URL is being indexed: (non-www vs www, index.html vs .com/, no session IDs, product variables, etc.

Review Your Backlinks
Run a linkdomain: command on Yahoo (this now takes you to Site Explorer). You can add the –site: command to exclude links coming from your own domain. It would look like this (linkdomain:yourdomain.com –site:yourdomain.com). Explore these to find out who is linking to you and why. This is also a great way to keep tabs on your online reputation. Are people saying “check out this site it’s great” or “this site is terrible”?

Review Your Competition
I know this sounds elementary, but it is surprising how many people neglect to do this at least once per month. Is anyone gaining ground on your most important keywords? Has anyone overtaken your? Are there any new players in the game? If you are not on top, what are the top sites doing that you’re not? Is any of it “spammy”? Should you report them or emulate them? Review their backlinks; are they getting links from any sites that you haven’t tried to get links from? How are they doing it? Click here to learn more about competitive intelligence.

Review Your Rankings
This can be done manually if you only have a few terms. Otherwise, you should be using a program like Web Position to find out what position your site is in for your most important keywords. Are you doing better or worse? What factors could be contributing to this? What is your goal for the next month / quarter?

Check Your Internal Search Data
Many sites will not have this functionality. But if you have a search box on your website, ensure that you are able to access the data. This is a much different metric than learning what peopled searched for in getting to your site, because you may not be ranking well enough for every term to show up on Google or Yahoo. By looking at your internal search logs, you learn a few things:

• Are there any keywords or misspellings that people search for which are not being targeted in your organic and PPC search campaigns?
• Are people looking for products or services that you do not (yet) offer?
• Are people having trouble, through your site navigation, with finding a product or service that you DO offer?

Check Your Server Logs and/or Analytics Program for Key Metrics
Most of what you will find in your server logs is going to be available in an easy-to-view format via your analytics program. However, if you would like to dig a little deeper, learn more about accessing and reading server logs here. Be careful not to get too addicted to your analytics program. If you spend too much time looking at pretty charts and graphs, there will be less time to actually perform the work to get results. We will not go over all of the metrics available in most programs, but it is important that you check things like: visits, page views, entrance pages, exit pages, keywords, traffic sources, etc.

Update Your Site Maps
Whether you are using a static HTML site map or are generating one dynamically, be sure that this is up-to-date. Often, webmasters will create a static HTML site map while building out the site, but will forget to add any new pages to it over the course of the next few months or years.

Write a Blog Entry
Do not even start a blog unless you plan on updating it at least once per week, if not every day. But adding this to the “monthly SEO housecleaning task list” will act as a safeguard for those extremely busy months. Also let this be a reminder to write a “substantive” blog entry at least once per month, if not every week. All too often, I find myself writing quick blurbs just to get a blog out. Time is short when business is good, and sometimes the last thing on my mind is this blog. Adding this to the list reminds me to write something good; to actually put more than a few minutes of thought into my post.

Search for New Directories
Are there any new directories in your niche? Many site owners will find a list of respected and/or niche directories to which they will submit their web site within the first three to six months. But new portals and directories are cropping up each day.

Do you have any housecleaning suggestions? Leave a comment and we may include them in this list. It’s a good way to earn a link…

As many of you already know, Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. So Amazon doesn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.

Many members of Congress take campaign contributions from these companies, and they don’t think the public are paying attention to this issue. Show them you are by contacting your congressperson and telling them to preserve Net Neutrality.

Click Here to contact your member in Congress

Read Google’s Guide to Net Neutrality

Read the latest news: Net Neutrality Back on FCC’s Agenda

Click Here to visit “Save The Internet”

Network Neutrality on Wikipedia

At a recent online journalism convention in Washington, D.C., Len Downie, Editor of the Washington Post, talked about the importance of blogging to traditional print publications. Here are a few quotes from Mr. Downie:

“Everyone in our newsroom wants to be a blogger.”

Even blogs that are critical of his paper are not looked at in a negative way because they “keep the paper honest”.

“Blogs are not competitors and not problems… Instead we have a very interesting symbiotic relationship. Our largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge.”

Mr. Downie (pictured above) also suggested that, rather than print media taking the lead and providing fodder for bloggers, the future would see more bloggers breaking news.

By the way, we were not at this conference. Mr. Downie’s quotes were published in an article by Editor and Publisher, which we would not have read if it weren’t for our subscription to the threadwatch.org blog. I personally posted a link to this article on Editor and Publisher from Digg.com, thus ensuring that dozens or hundreds more people read about it. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak.

 As many of you have noticed, First Page Fitness has devoted a few blog posts to Digg.com issues. Call it a ploy, call it Digg spamming, call it what you will. But the point is, Digg.com as an internet phenomenon is very interesting to us. We wanted to know how many people on there are generally interested health and fitness news, which is why we decided to do some ”digging” into the types of stories that top diggers are interested in. We wanted to know if those people actually stuck around after visiting a site from Digg.com, or if they clicked-and-split, as many have suggested. Is it worth the time for our clients to submit their health and fitness news stories to Digg.com? Should they even bother signing up? 

Although we had no idea that our stories (which were written out of general interest in Digg.com) would make it to the top page of Digg, they did and now we were able to answer a few of these questions. Some of them were considered “common knowledge” but we are never satisfied with knowledge related to helping our clients until we find out for ourselves. Here is what we have concluded: 

Health and fitness news is generally not big news on Digg.com unless is has to do with some breakthrough or medical device. 

Digg.com users do not stick around very long. The average time spent on our website (stickiness) drop dramatically on a per-user basis, as did the amount of pages viewed per visitor. 

Digg.com commentators are rude. Do not submit your story to Digg.com unless you are willing to put up with a bit of bad press from people who make it their life’s mission to put down other people. We all know a few people like that, but thought they grew out of it after high-school. 

Would we suggest submitting your news stories to Digg.com? No, not really. The traffic does not convert very well (if at all) and the users spend too little time on your website to fully grasp what it is that you do or what message you are trying to get across. This, of course, applies to our niche and may be a completely different story for other websites. For instance, a video game e-commerce site might find Digg.com to be a very qualified source of traffic. 

Would we suggest you sign up at Digg.com? Absolutely. We have been introduced to so many new websites and so many under-reported news stories that it will take weeks to digest. It is an extremely powerful source of aggregated information, independent of any single media corporation (like Fox or Clear Channel).