Technical SEO Audit – What You Need to Know

All of those SEO practices that Google has put out have the ultimate goal to give your customers a better user experience on your website. So you have done your content right, you have chosen the right keywords and you have optimized all of the images on your website. How about the technical aspect. Technical SEO refers to the steps you need to take to optimize your website for the crawling bots that go to your website. If you haven’t done it yet, here’s what you need to know in order to evaluate where your website stands to carry out a technical SEO audit (read also SEO Trends of 2018).

Look at the Website From All Sides

If you ask a person who works as a web developer, almost certainly they will tell you that this scenario has happened at least once in their career so far. A customer walks in and asks for a website. You code their website and optimize it for different devices. And they they strike you with the question: “Did you test the website on Internet Explorer?”. You want to burst into laughter but you are keeping yourself composed. Who uses Internet Explorer nowadays? Believe it or not, people do. So as outdated as it sounds, you still need to check how your website looks on Internet Explorer.

Another thing you should check is how your website looks if you disable JavaScript. People sometimes will disable JavaScript on the website, mostly to get rid of the ads. That’s why you need to make sure that your website is still functional even if you strip it from its JavaScript.

Pages Indexing

Are you sure that all of your pages are indexed? If you find your website when you search for it on Google, that means that your website is indexed as a whole. But is that the case with all of the pages on your website? Don’t assume – rather check. There might be a simple syntax error or something in your sitemap that it’s blocking spiders out. You can quickly check that by using an SEO crawler such as WebSite Auditor.

Block Access for Crawlers for Pages With No Value

Even though you want all of your pages to be indexed, there is an exception for several that you want to keep them away from crawlers. Pages that contain info such as privacy policy or terms and conditions do not provide any SEO value to your website. The best thing to do is to disallow access to spiders for pages like these in your sitemap.

Internal Linking

The pages on your website need to have a logical hierarchical order. Naturally, your homepage will contain the largest number of internal links, and from there on the structure needs to spread in a logical order when we are speaking about technical SEO. Try to minimize the click depth and keep your important pages no more than three clicks away from your home page.

Page Speed

Your page speed isn’t only important for the technical SEO, but it is also important to your users. A slow website doesn’t necessarily mean a bad website, but it is not a good indication to start with. Increase the speed of your website by minimizing the size of the elements.

  18/10/2018     4,478 Views