Even if you decide to use the a paid service/plugin such as Yoast or RankMath, the truth is that, although the individual post will have good 
SEO, your website can still have bad SEO – this is because links can get broken and, in general, the more content you have on your website, the more chance things will get lost and misplaced, with errors creeping in. Taking this into consideration, here are some maintenance tasks website owners should carry out on their website to keep the website health as high as possible.
404 Errors
A 404 error is the code that is given to a page on a website that cannot be found. There are many reasons this error could occur:
- The page has been deleted
- The page is broken
- The website potentially took too long to load
- There is an issue with the URL used
Either way, a 404 will not help SEO efforts in anyway. Not only will web users click away from such pages, Google will reduce the ranking of this page to zero if the 404 error appears to be a long term issue. This makes it vital to fix 404 errors as soon as they arise.
Crawl Issues
A website can only gain traffic from search engines if search engines can crawl through the pages, to index them for their search engine. If a page on a website does not get crawled, then it is very unlikely that search engines will show the page on any of their search engine results.
There are many websites out there that ‘act’ as a crawl robot, to show you what pages on a website can be crawled and what cannot, so you can focus your effort on making sure all of your pages can be crawled.
Broken Links
Broken links are bad for SEO, since they point web users to pages that don’t exist (404) or are plain broken.
Of course, as a website gets bigger and with more content, the chances of links you have used breaking increases and increases. This is why it is a good idea to use a SEO service that scans your websites for all links (both internal and external) to check if they are broken or not. If any of the links are broken, it is as simple as going into the post and removing or replacing the link.
As mentioned above, this applies to both internal and external linking. Put priority on internal links, in terms of fixing them first, and then address all external links that could be causing you issues.
