Saturday 6 March 2021

How To Perform a Technical SEO Audit in 14 Steps

 1. How To Spot and Fix Indexation and Crawlability Issues

  • The Site Audit Tool
  • The robots.txt file
  • The sitemaps
  • Subdomains
  • Indexed versus submitted pages

2. How To Address Common Site Architecture Issues

  • Site Structure
  • Site Hierarchy
  • URL Structure
  • Sitemap Fixes
  • robots.txt Fixes
3. How To Audit Canonical Tags and Correct Issues

  • Use only one canonical URL per page. The page shouldn’t direct a bot to multiple other pages, similar to how directions at an intersection can’t be “go both left and right.”
  • Use the correct domain protocol: HTTPS or HTTP.
  • Pay attention to how your URLs end: with a trailing slash or without.
  • Specify whether you want the www or the non-www version of the URL indexed.
  • Write the absolute URL in the canonical tag, not a relative URL.
  • Include a URL in the canonical tag that has no redirects (such as a 301 error) and is the direct target. It needs to result in a 200 OK status.
  • Tag only legitimate duplicate or near-identical content.
  • Be certain exact duplicate pages or pages with nearly identical content have the same canonical tag.
  • Include canonical tags in Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs).

4. How To Fix Internal Linking Issues on Your Site

Your site has two primary types of internal links:

  • Navigational: Often found in the header, footer, or sidebar
  • Contextual: Included within the content of the page

In this report, you’ll be alerted to two types of issues:

  • Orphaned pages: These pages have no links leading to them. That means you can’t gain access to them via any other page on the same website. Even if they’re listed in your sitemap, they may not be indexed by search engines.
  • Pages with high click depth: The farther away a page is from the homepage, the higher its click depth and the lower its value to search engines.

Ensure internal links:
  • Link directly to indexable pages
  • Link to pages that don’t have redirects
  • Provide relevant and helpful information for users and search engines — not random or unnecessary information

5. How To Check for and Fix Security Issues

  • Expired certificate: This Lets you know whether your security certificate needs to be renewed.
  • Certificate registered to the wrong domain name: Tells you if the registered domain name matches the one in your address bar.
  • Old security protocol version: Informs you if your website is running an old SSL or TLS protocol.
  • Non-secure pages with password inputs: Warns you if your website does not use HTTPS, which makes many users doubt the site’s security and leave.
  • No server name indication: Lets you know if your server supports SNI, which allows you to host multiple certificates at the same IP address to improve security.
  • No HSTS server support: Checks the server header response to make sure HTTP Strict Transport Security is implemented, which makes your site more secure for users.
  • Mixed content: Determines if your site contains any unsecure content, which can trigger a “not secure” warning in browsers.
  • Internal links to HTTP pages: Gives you a list of links leading to vulnerable HTTP pages.
  • No redirects or canonicals to HTTPS URLs from HTTP versions: Lets you know if search engines are indexing an HTTP and HTTPS version of your site, which can impact your web traffic because pages can compete against each other in search results. 
  • HTTP links in the sitemap.xml: Lets you know if you have HTTP links in your sitemap.xml, which may lead to incomplete crawls of your site by search engines.

6. How To Improve Site Speed

When you audit a site for speed, you have two data points to consider:

  • Page speed: How long it takes one webpage to load
  • Site speed: The average page speed for a sample set of page views on a site
The Site Audit report will help you find and fix performance issues with:

  • Large HTML page size
  • Redirect chains and loops
  • Slow page load speed
  • Uncompressed pages
  • Uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files
  • Uncached JavaScript and CSS files
  • Too large JavaScript and CSS total size
  • Too many JavaScript and CSS files
  • Unminified JavaScript and CSS files
  • Slow average document interactive time
  • Optimize images
After images, focus on JavaScript and CSS optimization. Use minification, which “removes whitespace and comments to optimize CSS and JS files.” To speed up your website further: 
  • Clear up redirects
  • Use browser caching
  • Reduce the file size of media, including video and gifs
  • Minimize HTTP requests
  • Choose a hosting provider that can adequately manage your website’s size
  • Use a content delivery network (CDN)
  • Compress HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files with Gzip compression

7. How To Discover the Most Common Mobile-Friendliness Issues

8. How To Spot and Fix the Most Common Code Issues

  • HTML
  • CSS (.css)
  • JavaScript (.js)
  • Meta Tags
  • The Open Graph protocol, including Twitter Card markup
  • Schema.org

9. How To Spot and Fix Duplicate Content Issues

  • Multiple Versions of URLs
  • Pages with Sparse Content
  • URL Search Parameters

10. How To Find and Fix Redirect Errors

3xx Status Codes

  • 301: The redirect is permanent. This is for identical or close-match content that’s been moved to a new URL, and is preferred because it passes SEO value to the new page.
  • 302: This indicates a temporary redirect for identical or close-match content. This could be used in instances where you’re A/B testing a new page template, for example.
  • 307: This also indicates a temporary redirect, but means it’s changing protocol from the source to the destination. These redirects should be avoided.
4xx Status Codes

  • 403: Access is forbidden, which generally means a login is required.
  • 404: The resource doesn’t exist and the link needs to be fixed.
  • 410: The resource is permanently gone.
  • 429: There are too many requests on the server in too short a time.
5xx Status Codes

11. Log File Analysis

In it you’ll see:

  • Bots: How many requests different search engine bots are making to your site each day
  • Status Codes: The breakdown of different HTTP status codes found per day
  • File Types: A breakdown of the different file types crawled each day

12. On-Page SEO

  • Lengthy Title Tags
  • Missing H1s
  • Duplicate Title and H1 Tags
  • Thin Content

13. International SEO

  • hreflang
  • Geo-Targeting and Additional International SEO Tips

14. Local SEO

  • Google My Business (GMB)
  • Optimizing Your Website for Local SEO
  • Local Link Building

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