Technical SEO Audit

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Transcript of Technical SEO Audit

THE COMPLETE SEO TECHNICAL AUDIT

@hannahjthorpe @outreachdigit

Hannah ThorpeHead of SEO

@[email protected]

Technical SEO

Content Marketing

Social Strategy

I improve websites for customers,

which helps brands sell more

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Our expertise

Technical  SEO Content  Marketing Digital  PR/  Social  Media

Paid  Media

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There are approximately

54, 261searches on Google every second

http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-­‐second/#google-­‐band

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In 2016, global B2C ecommerce sales are

predicted to reach 1.92 trillion US dollars

http://www.statista.com/statistics/261245/b2c-­‐e-­‐commerce-­‐sales-­‐worldwide/

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TL;DRThe internet is important.

Take your website performance seriously.

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Sometimes blue sky thinking just isn’t enough. Let’s get practical.

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One technical audit, fully implemented = 105.2% increase in number of organic sessions last

month

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There are approximately

54, 261different ways to do a technical audit*

*This is probably not true

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C R A W L Y O U R W E B S I T E

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WHEN BOTS CRAWL A PAGE, THEY "READ" THE CONTENT ON THE PAGE AND ASSOCIATE IT WITH A URL. THIS INFORMATION IS THEN PUT IN GOOGLE'S INDEX (DATABASE OF CONTENT AND URLS) AND IT BECOMES ACCESSIBLE VIA SEARCH. THIS PROCESS IS CALLED INDEXING.

I N D E X I N G

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HOW  TO  SEE  LEVELS OF INDEXATION

Check for disparity between all measures of indexed

pages

Number of html pages found by Screaming Frog

Does this number make

sense for your business?

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Robots.txt Meta Robots X Robots

Prevent crawling Yes No No

Prevent Indexing Yes Yes Yes

Prevent URL from showing up in index No Yes Yes

Remove content from index No Yes Yes

Easily implement on specific pages No Yes Yes

CONTROLLING  YOUR  CRAWLING & INDEXING

WHEN GOOGLEBOT, BINGBOT, OR THE OTHER SEARCH CRAWLERS ACCESS A PAGE ON YOUR WEBSITE, THE SERVER HEADER INFORMATION IS SERVED TO THEM. THE WRONG STATUS CODE CAN SEND THE WRONG SIGNAL TO A SEARCH CRAWLER AND NEGATIVELY AFFECT CRAWLABILITY AND RANKABILITY OF A WEBSITE PAGE.

S T A T U S C O D E S

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200. Everything is fine with the page and the crawler should crawl, cache, and index the page.

301. The page has been moved permanently to another page, so the crawler should instead crawl,

cache, and index the new final page.

302. The page has been moved temporarily. The page should not be removed from the index and

link equity is not passed, but both crawlers and visitors are redirected.

404. The page is no longer in existence or accessible to the search crawlers. Crawlers will

eventually drop the page from the index and users will usually receive a 404 page from the website.

410. Page is gone, and is not expected to be back. Remove page from the index.

500. A server error exists and no content is accessible to either crawlers or search engines.

503. A “temporarily unavailable” status code that informs the crawlers and users to return later. The

503 is the best choice for site maintenance, as it is crawler friendly.

MOST COMMON STATUS CODES

Ayima Redirect PathChrome Extension

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The cause? A trailing slashhttp://www.outreachdigital.org/our-team-2016/

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500 SERVER PROBLEMS

This needs to go to your

developers. 500 status

codes are necessary at

certain times so don’t

eliminate them!

HOW TO FIX UNWANTED STATUS CODES

403 & 404 PAGES

Remove all internal

references to these.

Getting these response

codes to display when

needed can be done with a

plugin/developer

301 & 302 REDIRECTS

Update the internal links;

usually these are

templated ones and are

due to a change in site

architecture

YOUR URL STRUCTURE & SITE ARCHITECTURE IS KEY TO HELPING GOOGLEBOT UNDERSTAND YOUR WEBSITE. FOLDERS ARE YOUR FRIEND FOR ORGANISING PAGES AND BEING ABLE TO MAKE BIG EDITS TO THE SITE.

U R L S T R U C T U R E

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SITE ARCHITECTURE

1. Protocol – HTTP or HTTPs2. Subdomain – www or custom3. Domain4. Top Level Domain (TLD) - .com, .org5. Category6. Slug

http://www.domain.com/category/slug

URL COMPONENTS

DUPLICATE CONTENT IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS TO MANY SITES. MANY TIMES THE DUPLICATE CONTENT IS NOT INTENTIONAL AND CREATED BY THE WEBSITES CMS OR HOSTING SERVER. THERE ARE OTHER TYPES OF DUPLICATE CONTENT THAT ARE INTENTIONAL AND HAVE THE POSSIBILITY OF HURTING THE PERFORMANCE OF AN ENTIRE SITE.

D U P L I C A T E C O N T E N T

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PANDAFirst hit: Feb 2011

The Panda algorithm update affected up to 12% of searchresults. Panda cracked down onwebsites with thin content,content farms and high ad-to-content ratio.

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CHECK FOR COMMONLY FOUND PROBLEMS

• http://www.outreachdigital.org• http://outreachdigital.org• https://www.outreachdigital.org• https://outreachdigital.org• www.outreachdigital.org• outreachdigital.org

• http://www.outreachdigital.org/• http://outreachdigital.org/• https://www.outreachdigital.org/• https://outreachdigital.org/• outreachdigital.org/• www.outreachdigital.org/

To a robot crawling a site, every different way of typing a URL can be seen as a unique page.

E.g.

Use 301 redirects to point to one single version of each page, consistently across the site. Implement self-referencing canonical tags on the core URLs to safeguard the site

TOOLS TO FIND INTERNAL DUPLICATE CONTENT

http://www.siteliner.com/

Other types of duplicate content may be found from a user perspective, or by utilising a tool such as Siteliner:

EXTERNAL DUPLICATE CONTENT

http://www.copyscape.com/

External duplicate content is a higher risk for websites, as it can trigger an algorithmic filter more severe than internal duplication.

Common Causes:

• Stockists using similar product descriptions

• Affiliate sites using the same content

• Legacy SEO tactics

• Low quality sites stealing your content

IF YOU FIND YOUR PAGES ARE OFTEN TOO SIMILAR OR FLAGGED FOR DUPLICATE CONTENT THEN YOU CAN USE CANONICALS OR PAGINATION TO HANDLE THE ISSUE. THESE ARE WAYS OF TALKING DIRECTLY TO THE SEARCH ENGINE BOTS TO EXPLAIN WHY YOUR SITE IS SET UP IN THAT WAY

C A N O N I C A L S & P A G I N A T I O N

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CANONICALS HELP TO ADD CONTEXT

A canonical indicates which version of the content you’d prefer to be indexed, however it does not stop the user accessing the other page, or it being indexed on specific queries

https://econsultancy.com/blog/67811-how-canonical-tags-helped-waterstones-solve-a-product-ranking-nightmare/

PAGINATION IS GOOD FOR LISTS OF CONTENT

Use pagination to mark-up that a list of blog posts, page 1, 2, 3 etc will all be similar and

follow on from one another

THE SPEED AT WHICH YOUR WEBSITE LOADS AND CAN BE USED BY ITS VISITORS IS IMPORTANT FROM A USER PERSPECTIVE. IT IS ALSO A KNOWN PART OF GOOGLE’S RANKING ALGORITHM SO KEEP AN EYE ON THE SIZE OF YOUR PAGES & OPTIMISE THEIR LOADING.

S I T E S P E E D

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TEST, TEST & TEST AGAIN

IT’S THOUGHT THAT CLICK-THROUGH RATE IS A RANKING FACTOR; WITH THIS IN MIND MAKING YOUR ORGANIC SEARCH RESULTS STAND OUT AND ADD EXTRA VALUE TO THE USER IS CRUCIAL TO YOUR SEO AUDIT.

S T R U C T U R E D M A R K - U P

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Structured mark-up is the way you make your results have those yellow stars in them…

… you can also mark-up your products, events, brand, phone

number, etc.

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• Nested Values – allows lots of information in one place

• Quicker & simpler – both learning JSON-LD and editing it

WHAT IS JSON-LD?

JSON- LD IN REAL LIFE

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

TEST YOUR MARK-UP

YOU’VE PROBABLY ALL HEARD OF ‘MOBILEGEDON’ AS GOOGLE PUTS MORE OF AN EMPHASIS ON MOBILE-FRIENDLY WEBSITES IN THE SEARCH RESULTS ITS KEY THAT WE THINK ABOUT MOBILE AS PART OF OUR STRATEGIES.

M O B I L E

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EA RL Y MORNING

Mobiles brighten the commute

DAYTIME E V E NING

PCsdominate working hours Tablets are popular at night

DEVICE PREFERENCES THROUGHOUT THE DAY

•Is the text size legible?•How close together are the links?•Is the content wider than the screen?

Tool:https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

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FINAL THOUGHTS

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OUR ADVICE FOR WEBMASTERS IS TOFOCUS ON CREATING HIGH QUALITY SITESTHAT CREATE A GOOD USER EXPERIENCEAND EMPLOY WHITE HAT SEO METHODSINSTEAD OF ENGAGING IN AGGRESSIVEWEBSPAM TACTICS…

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The Core TakeawaysRemember it’s humans who use your sites not robots, so make sure all changes make sense to users too1

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There’s no such thing as a quick win; but prioritise getting full tasks completed quickly

You will never be done optimising your site; keep on top of it and constantly re-audit

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Extra Resources…http://www.themediaflow.com/technical-seo-audit-checklist

https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015

https://www.distilled.net/resources/technical-audit-checklist-for-human-beings/

https://www.semrush.com/blog/my-top-8-tools-for-a-technical-seo-audit/

https://www.koozai.com/resources/whitepapers/how-to-perform-a-technical-seo-audit/

white.net@hannahjthorpe

[email protected]

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Tools…Crawling Screaming Frog, Deep Crawl, Xenu

Redirect Monitoring Ayima Redirect Path, Check My Links

Duplicate Content Detection Siteliner, Copyscape

Site Speed tools.pingdom.com, WebPageTest

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Thanks for listening!

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