There are controls SEO checks that can never miss in your lineup of the obligations and duties of every self-respecting webmaster. At the base of an activity dedicated to search engines, there is a starting search, a keyword analysis that you must develop to understand how to position yourself on search engines.
Once you have structured the work to be done with your content, you have a goal: to improve the website. To do this you need to make sure not only that you have created the best possible articles and the landing page. On the web, you have to make sure that everything develops as well as possible.
Smoothly. Then it is clear that some problems could always arise, so there are procedures to follow and useful practices to prevent your content marketing work from being dispersed due to a lack of attention on the search engine optimization side. Better to avoid all this, right? Here are the SEO checks you need to put into practice today because they aren’t too complex.
The Topic Of This Post
- Site Speed test
- H1, title, and description
- Presence of 404 errors
- Watch out for traffic
- Is your site visible?
- Sitemap errors
- Check the robot.txt
- Check the alt texts
- Your SEO checks
Site Speed Test
The first SEO check I want to propose has a clear and concrete connection with the website user experience. Speed is essential for your web strategy, you should never underestimate the importance of web pages loading time. Google considers all of this as a ranking factor, but think about what lies behind this work.
You don’t have to improve website times because Google tells you so, but to give the user the best possible experience. From desktop computers and smartphones with unstable connections. This is the essential point to work in the best possible way.
SEO checks to put into practice? You can start with Page Speed Insight to check desktop and mobile loading speed, and learn more with Web Page Speed Tool which offers detailed results.
H1, Title, and Description
This is one of the cornerstones for your SEO analysis: you have to check the Google meta tags and all the elements that could be related to on-page optimization. Of course, if you want to optimize the individual resources you have to continue towards the page but with Screaming Frog you can activate interesting checks to discover missing or too short title and meta description tags, without forgetting the H1 tag: better make sure it is present.
There are 404 Errors
This is a pretty simple check to give the website some extra peace of mind. Assuming that there are no projects of a certain depth without 404 errors and that these are not necessarily a drama, the principle is to solve these problems by directing people and search engines to relevant resources. Especially if you notice, through the Search Console, 404s are generated continuously.
The screen for listing site errors.
You can discover these elements thanks to the specific section dedicated to the errors of indexing. Because they show you errors other than the classic 404 and that Google found when it analyzed your process. What to do in these cases?
Fix 404 errors, for this, you have to work with 301 redirects. If you are not familiar with the access you can use the WordPress Redirection plugin: I assure you that it has never been so easy to redirect. With Broken Link Checker, on the other hand, you can fix broken internal links that are always a problem.
Beware of Traffic
I suggest you check Google Analytics every day, an indicator of the health of the site, and the first step to consider is to understand if there is any problem. And I add: activate email alerts to receive news of any traffic drops or gains. If you have the habit of not checking the dashboard for a few days (it can happen at certain times) it can save your life. To activate them read the official Google guide.
Is Your Site Visible?
This is a test to do: forced crawl of the site with the Search Console (view as Google) allows you to understand how your web pages present themselves to the attention of the search engine.
My Social Web looks good on Google!
This check is very simple: you have to enter the URL. This way you can allow the search engine to have an updated version of your work and get a clear comparison between what the spider sees and the human eye. If there are any differences between the two versions you have to run for cover and figure out what is being blocked by the crawler
Sitemap Errors
A little reminder: make sure you’ve uploaded a valid sitemap and check the Search Console for any crawling issues. The sitemap can give you a great advantage in terms of indexing, so make sure the XML file is present and always working. This is especially important for dynamic websites, which are always publishing new resources, like a blog
Check the Robot
The robot.txt is used to suggest precise instructions to Google regarding the behavior towards certain pages. There are resources that you don’t want to show, that you prefer to keep out of the spider’s attention. You must be very careful to fill in this element carefully. For a quick check you can use the tool always present in the Google Search Console and check that the structure looks like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
This combination means that you have enabled all bots and that you have not prevented indexing of any resources. The moment you add a specific directory or URL in the second entry you can prevent Google from considering these resources. What to check? Make sure that all crawlers are present in the content crawl and that pages that interest you are not excluded from indexing.
A concrete example? Simple, just type Disallow: / to prevent Google from indexing your site. Sometimes this is enough to answer the question: why is my site not visible on Google?
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Check the Alt Texts
Did you insert alternative text in every blogs or website image? This element is important for SEO optimization of images but it is difficult to ascertain every single element uploaded. But some help you to solve the problem. Just use Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool to have a report with all the photos and graphics that have not been given the right attention. Interesting, isn’t it?
Your SEO Checks
What are the essential checks to test the good health of a website? What are the SEO checks that should never be missing? In this list, you will find a series of useful, simple, and immediate indications to verify the goodness of the insurance website. This is a basic guide, an SEO audit is something more articulated and complex.
If you want more information on the subject leave your need in the comments. The same goes for new ideas and reflections on the always interesting topic of SEO tests and website checks.
