Sep
13
The Complete Technical SEO Checklist
As we all know, generally in SEO we have On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. Often Technical things are referred as a part of On Page SEO, but generally Technical stuff itself includes a checklist. Unlike On page & Off page SEO, Technical SEO doesn’t take much time. They are relatively simple and easy to finish.
After a wide research, we have made this list of Technical SEO things. If you follow these things, it’ll makes your website ranks better and it makes the Search Engine to crawl&index your website faster
1. Broken links & Redirect chains
It may be sound as an unimportant task to do. But, finding and fixing Broken links & Redirect chains is primarily important. First, Broken links provides negative User Experience to the visitor and Affect your rankings. so, it is worth to find and fix the broken links. For checking the link status on your website, please add this Check my Links extension in your browser. It’ll show you the no of links, redirects, broken links. Find that and fix broken links
Redirection is okay if it is necessary, but overdoing it will leads to slower website. Slower website leads to poor user experience, increase bounce rate thus leads to lower rankings.
2. GSC, GA & Tag Manager
Create accounts by verifying your website in Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics (GA), and Tag manager. By setting up the Google search console (GSC), we can able to see and fix the technical aspects of the website.
You can see the performance report of the website, URL inspection (where you can submit your URL for index in google), Links, and several other features. Google Analytics helps you in analyzing your website traffic and draw valuable insights from it.
3. Fix the Canonicalization
Your website might have multiple URLs for the same page. For example, for career page. You may have
- https://site.com/career/
- https://www.site.com/ career /
- https://www.site.com/ career
- https://site.com/ career
- http://www.site.com/ career
It may look same set of URLs for you, but when it comes to search engines, they are multiple different URL. so we need to make sure to tell the search engine that which version of URL should be shown for the particular query. For that give rel tag to the particular original URL you wish to rank for.
4. Implementing Proper Structure Markup
The next important factor which should be included in the Structure Markup. Generally, it tells additional information to the search engine about the website like address, ratings, time, price and other useful set of information. Proper Structure Markup will help in increasing Click through rate, high chances of getting expanded meta description, and inclusion of eye-catching elements.
5. Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file which is uploaded in the site, This will tell the search engines to which page/post should be processed or crawled, and what shouldn’t. You can use disallow if you didn’t want the Search Engine to crawl & index the particular URL, For that, you can go to the Google Search Console go to crawl—>robots.txt tester.
6. Identify and fix crawl errors
In Google Search Console, you can check for issues like crawl errors, broken links, toxic links, redirection issues, duplicate content issues, meta description issues. In that you need to check and fix crawl errors, there’ll some crawl limit for your website. If there’s any error i.e lesser no of crawled & indexed pages that the actual limit. Also, crawl error happens when the Search Engine can’t able to reach the website.
7. Check HTTP status code
It is important to change to HTTP version of your website to HTTPS. Since Google takes secure site as one of its ranking factor. It’ll give you slight spike in rankings and provide positive user experience for the visitor. Also choose the preferred domain ( whether it be a www or non www version). Don’t get confused often and change the website between www and non www. Fix it before which version of the website you wish you want to go through.
Consider www version if the domain name is of less characteristics, don’t use www if the domain name have medium or more no of characters.
8. Customize 404 page
There might be chances, if you look for particular web page is not available showing it as 404 error. Which will affect your website rankings and leads to poor user experience. so with a help of your designer, design a custom 404 page, which address the users to either homepage or any other pages of the website.
9. XML sitemap
XML sitemap tells the search engine what is the website hierarchy, the pages and sub pages, which helps the search engines to quick and easy crawl and index faster. XML sitemap doesn’t need much for website less than 500 pages. If it is more 500 pages, XML sitemap is way more helpful.
10. Fix the duplicate and thin content on your website
Google loves new, fresh and detailed content which gives visitors a good experience, make them to spend more time on the website. Not every content in the web is unique. And also not every content is detailed, most of them are thin content and duplicate content. You might have two or three pages with similar types of content, which may be seen as a duplicate content in front of the audience. so find those pages, rewrite it and submit it for crawling and indexing. Provide much detailed content as possible.
Conclusion:
If you follow the above Technical SEO checklist, your website will get rankings in google, even help in ranking in the top for upcoming contents. These factors mentioned in the list might look like small or negligible issue, but it is not. It’ll create a huge impact on rankings in the search engine.
