Best Technical SEO

Assalamualikum Wr. Wb

Do you want to make sure your site’s coding isn’t ruining your chances at high rankings? Use our checklist to make sure you abide by best practice.

Quick Checks

• Site is ranked number 1 for brand name.

• Home page is number 1 for site:yourURL.com

• Robots.txt is not restricting access to important parts of your site. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find out what pages are being blocked.

• Check the cache of your main pages in Google. Is the content and navigation what you expect?

• Home page and main pages contain text content (a few paragraphs)

Tracking Setup

• Google Webmaster tools is enabled on your site

• Google Analytics (or other analytics package) is enabled on your site

Accessibility

• Have an effective 404 error page

Sitemaps

• Site has html, xml, image and video sitemaps in place

• All sitemaps are uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools

• Use a free tool like Xenu or Screaming Frog to crawl your site and identify all the
pages.

• Are there pages in your site-crawl which were not included in sitemap? Investigate why

• Are there pages in the sitemap which weren’t listed in your site-crawl? Investigate why they are not being reached.

• Use site crawler to find all broken links. Fix where possible

Site Architecture

• How many clicks does it take to get from the home page to your important pages. If more than two – consider why it is taking so long.

• Do spot checks of content in Google to find out if there are any duplicate content issues. Duplicate content should be avoided – if two or more pages have the same content, the duplicates need to be either rewritten or redirected.

• Perform two separate site crawls: one with JavaScript di sabled and another with it enabled. Compare the corresponding link graphsto identify sections of the site that are inaccessible without JavaScript.

• Ensure your site uses sensible subfolders to categorise pages.

Code Issues

• turn off JavaScript, CSS and Cookies – is your content still there?

• Are content or links being served in JavaScript?

• Is the whole site in Flash?

• Use Seo-browser.com to see how a search engine sees your important pages, and identify any issues.

• Use an html validator like w3 Validator to identify any html issues.

• Use Webmaster Tools to identify where meta titles and meta descriptions are duplicate or missing. Meta
titles should be unique and include keywords. Meta descriptions should be unique and written toencourage click through to your site.

• Check the speed of your site. There are many free tools available, such as Google’s site speed tool.

• Ensure URLs do not use excessive parameters

• Does your site use paginated content? Use rel=”next” and rel=”prev”

• Does your site serve up multiple pages that are very similar – eg product categories sorted by price and
by popularity. If so use canonical tags

• Can the same content be viewed on two different URLs? If so, decide which one you think will perform best on Google (usually the one with the most internal links pointed at it) and implement a
301 redirect. Make sure there is no internal navigation to the redirected page.

Formatting

• our site should use Header tags on every page – the most important headings
will use H1, less important using H2, then H3 and so on.

• Images have keyword-relevant alternative text.

• mages have relevant file names Internal links use informativ
e anchor text. I.e. “read our accounting news ” not “ click here ”

• Check internal links for ‘no follow’

• Continue to regularly monitor the health of your site using Google Webmaster Tools