Technical SEO Checklist for Beginners: 8 Things You Need to Check
Every website can be optimized to rank higher in search engines, but that doesn’t mean every site should. The decisions you make about your website’s content and code are important, because they affect the quality of your content, the clarity of your message, and ultimately the value of your product or service. If you have no idea where to start with technical SEO, here’s an eight-point plan that covers some of the basics you need to consider when optimizing your website from a technical standpoint.
1) Check Your Site’s Health
One of the first things you should do is check your site's health. This will give you a general idea of how well your site is ranking and if there are any technical issues that could be hampering your rankings. You can use a free tool like Moz’s Site Crawl to see where you rank in Google and other search engines. You can also use it to find out how many 404 errors your site has, which is something you want as few as possible. 404 errors show that the content on your website isn't relevant or no longer exists, so they'll cause a decrease in organic traffic over time. If this happens, it may indicate that you need to re-write or update some of your content because it doesn't provide an accurate representation of what you're selling or talking about. It can also mean that you have duplicate content (which means you have two pages with the same information), which makes both pages less effective. If there's too much duplicate content, it could lead to penalization from search engines. There are lots of ways to fix 404 errors, such as redirecting broken links or using JavaScript codes - read more about them here!
2) Check for Indexation Issues
Indexation issues are one of the most common problems with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A lack of indexation can lead to a site's content not being seen by searchers, and if left unchecked, it may cause your website to be de-indexed. But how do you know if your website has an indexation issue?
First, make sure that you have Google Webmaster Tools installed on your site. Next, go into Search Console within Webmaster Tools and click Index Status. The results will show all pages indexed in Google search results. If your desired page isn't there, there is likely an indexation problem.
3) Check Your Site’s Structure
Checking your site's structure is the first step of any technical SEO audit. This should include looking at the HTML and CSS code, evaluating page titles, meta descriptions, and page URLs. If you have a large website with many pages, it may be more efficient to use a crawler or specialized tool like Screaming Frog instead of manually checking each URL one-by-one. Once you've identified problems in your site’s code, fix them! There are plenty of free tools available to help with this process. Don't forget that crawling will continue even after a problem has been fixed, so be sure to clear those errors out of the system before they get indexed by Google.
4) Check Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
The most important aspects of technical SEO are your title tags and meta descriptions. These two items are the only ones that show up in search engine results, so they need to be optimized. Your title tag should have at least 70 characters including spaces. It needs a keyword phrase or keyword phrases if possible, and it needs to say something about the content of your page. For example, How to Fix Broken Links might be a good title tag if you're discussing how to fix broken links on a website. But you could also use Optimize Your Site for Search Engines as a more general title tag. Meta descriptions are even shorter than title tags and should be no longer than 160 characters with no more than 2 sentences.
5) Check Your Hreflang Tags
Hreflang Tags can be used to specify your content's language and regional versions. Hreflang tags should point at a URL that is the same as the canonical URL, but with different hreflang information. It's also important that the hreflang tags are set up correctly on both of those pages.
In order to make sure this happens, you'll need to make sure they're implemented correctly on both pages. One way to do this is by using a tool like Xenu Link Sleuth. Google's Structured Data Testing Tool will help you ensure that Schema markup is correct and it will highlight any errors or warnings for you so you can quickly identify what needs to be fixed. Checking Your XML Sitemaps: An XML sitemap lists all of the pages on your site to let search engines know about all of the webpages available for indexing.
6) Check Your Robots.txt File
A robots.txt file is a simple text file that allows you to control how search engines index your website. This can be helpful if, for example, you have an area of your site that is no longer active or has been archived. All you have to do is add the following line of code into your robots.txt and it will tell Google not to index that content anymore: User-agent: * Disallow: /example-page/ This tells all crawlers not to crawl any page within the example-page directory (including subdirectories). If you want to specify particular bots or directories only, replace * with a user agent like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /example-page/
You should also take note that by doing this, any links pointing back to those pages will stop working.
7) Check Your XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is a file containing a list of all the pages on your website that are available for crawling. It is usually submitted to search engines so they know which pages should be indexed and ranked. It’s also used by crawlers to locate specific URLs.
So, how do you make sure your site has an XML Sitemap? It’s easy! Here’s a step-by-step guide from Google Webmaster Tools on how to create one.
If you want more detailed instructions, check out this post from Screaming Frog about how to use their crawler tool for creating an XML Sitemap for you. The only downside is that it costs money, but if you are serious about getting found in Google Search then it might be worth the investment. Once you have created your XML Sitemaps, update them periodically (every 3-6 months) as your site changes.
8) Use Google Search Console
The best way to check your site's technical SEO health is by using Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). Here are a few things you need to check on the Search Analytics page.
1) Index Status 2) Crawl Stats 3) Diagnostics 4) Sitemap. We also recommend checking out this free technical SEO checklist and reading our detailed guide on how to use Google Search Console effectively. If you have any questions or comments, please post them in the comment section below!
