To make sure your SEO techniques are implemented properly, it’s of utmost importance to check your website for mistakes you might have made along the way. However, auditing your website is a holistic concept that is not easy to implement without a profound understanding of its weak spots. Let’s take a look at some ways to avoid the most common issues we meet during an SEO audit.
Look for Crawl Errors
It’s imperative that every link to your domain leads to a reachable page, that is, a page with appropriate content. You can use a site crawler tool to inspect Site or URL errors which prevent search bot from further indexing of your content. This is especially a problem for websites with a lot of updated content or redirected pages. Sometimes there are leftover links on third-party websites from a backlinking campaign from the past. Make sure those links are updated or removed depending on the changes you’ve made since then.
Secure your site with HTTPS
When you implement HTTPS protocol to improve the security of your platform, there are certain issues that might occur, which you might be unaware of such as outdated security protocols, pages that don’t use HTTPS for some technical reason, or many other security weak spots that might have a negative influence on your ranking. Don’t fail to check website for errors like these while performing the audit process of your online presentation.
Meta title length
According to research, the optimal meta title length is between 50 and 60 characters, which varies on several aspects including display resolution. The research also suggests that a proper meta description provides full information to the reader, which has a positive influence on the click-through rate. That saves a lot of money with PPC campaigns and improves your conversion rate significantly. Introducing some competitive keywords to your meta descriptions also helps your SEO endeavors.
Canonical URLs
When people check SEO issues, they tend to forget about pages that have multiple links leading to the same content. It’s imperative to add a canonical tag to links we wish to determine as authoritative in the “eyes” of web crawlers. This is one of the ways to avoid rank drop because search engines register duplicate content and tag you for plagiarism. These issues might occur if you switch from HTTP to https protocol or if some of your pages are linked without the security protocol prefix, using only the world wide web abbreviation in front of the domain name.
Eliminate redirect chains
It’s customary practice to redirect your visitors to an updated version of a page or move your entire website to a new domain but you don’t want to lose those people who know your old web address. However, redirecting an already redirected page or creating even longer chains causes a negative SEO effect, if nothing, then by increasing the time it takes to display the content. Check if you have long redirect chains and eliminate them or find a way to avoid them, advised SEO professionals from Millenio. There are plugins you can use to fix these issues most effectively.
Find Missing or duplicated page titles
Page titles tell search bot what a certain page is about as much as it helps the users get more details regarding your content. Therefore make sure you don’t have the same page titles for different links or if some pages miss their titles. You can use a piece of software to crawl site for broken links, missing titles, and many other issues your platform might experience.
One more piece of suggestion regarding the page title strategy for you is to use a longtail keyword to maximize the efficiency of your page title.
Audit your images
Images take a lot of space so their size can somewhat reduce the page load speed and reduce your SEO score, even cause people to avoid your website. The quality of the images you present also have their role in your conversion rate, poor imagery saves space but doesn’t show your product or message in its full extent. Also, don’t forget about naming every image in accord with what it represents, so your links would be relevant when people search for images.
Conclusion
Adapting your website to search engines is an everlasting process, and there is a constant need for improvements and changes in the way your website performs and the content you create. Out of this continuous maintenance process mistakes and overlooks are perfectly normal to occur. Nevertheless, knowing what might go wrong and how to fix or avoid problems is of immeasurable value.
