#url blocking is broken on mobile and as a mobile user its better to just. distance
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i need to update my rules on my blogs but i am feeling icky and my blogs have been breaking containment so i think i need to add a dni to my rules. until i get to that, unless we're currently already friends/mutuals pls don't follow me if you frequently interact with sasu or everi 🙏 its not a huge deal because my issues with them are years old at this point but for my personal comfort i just want to distance myself
#url blocking is broken on mobile and as a mobile user its better to just. distance#i don't mind explaining but i don't want to sway anyone's opinions on them bc again.#my problems w them are years old and they're probably different/better people now
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Unleashing the Power of Technical SEO: A Comprehensive Audit Guide
Welcome to “Unleashing the Power of Technical SEO: A Comprehensive Audit Guide.” In this guide, we delve into the fascinating world of technical search engine optimization (SEO) and explore how it can propel your website to new heights of visibility and success.
Whether you’re an experienced SEO expert or just beginning your online journey, this complete audit guide will give you the tools and information you need to improve your website’s technical elements successfully.
From site speed and crawl ability to structured data and mobile optimization, we leave no stone unturned in exploring the key elements that can unleash the true potential of your website’s SEO. Get ready to unlock the power of technical SEO and propel your online presence to greater heights.
What Is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit is like a digital health check-up for a website. It involves analyzing and evaluating various technical aspects of a site to uncover issues affecting its search engine performance and user experience.
Think of it as a detective mission where you uncover hidden problems and optimize the website’s infrastructure. During a technical SEO audit, experts examine website speed, mobile-friendliness, URL structure, indexing, and crawling issues, sitemap accuracy, broken links, duplicate content, schema markup implementation, and more.
They also inspect the server configuration, SSL certificate, and security measures to ensure a safe browsing experience. This audit helps identify areas for improvement, which are then addressed to enhance a website’s visibility, user engagement, and search engine rankings.
By optimizing the technical foundation, the website becomes more accessible, user-friendly, and appealing to search engines, resulting in better organic traffic and higher chances of success in the digital realm.
How to Do a Technical SEO Check to Improve Your Website’s Ranking?
Performing a technical SEO audit is crucial for improving your website’s ranking and overall performance. Here’s a crisp and creative step-by-step guide:
1. Crawl and Indexability
Use a web crawler tool to identify any issues preventing search engines from properly crawling and indexing your website. Fix broken links, ensure XML sitemaps are in place, and check for blocked resources.
2. Website Speed
Optimize your website’s loading speed to enhance user experience and search engine rankings. Compress images, leverage browser caching, minify CSS and JavaScript files, and consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve content faster.
3. Mobile Optimization
Make sure your website is fully optimized for mobile devices. Responsive design, fast loading times, and mobile-friendly features are essential for ranking well in mobile search results.
4. URL Structure
Review your URLs and ensure they are clean, descriptive and include relevant keywords. Avoid excessive parameters or dynamic URLs that may confuse search engines and users
5. Metadata Optimization
Optimize your page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags (H1, H2, etc.) with relevant keywords and compelling messaging to improve click-through rates and search engine visibility.
6. Schema Markup
Implement structured data markup (schema.org) to give search engines more information about your content. This can enhance your website’s appearance in search results with rich snippets and other SERP features.
7. Site Architecture
Ensure your website has a logical and user-friendly structure. Organize your content into relevant categories and establish a hierarchical structure using internal linking. This helps search engines grasp how different pages are connected to each other.
8. Technical Errors
Identify and fix any technical errors that may negatively impact your website’s performance and indexing. Look for issues like duplicate content, broken redirects, server errors, and canonicalization problems.
9. HTTPS and Security
Switch to HTTPS to ensure a secure browsing experience for your users. This improves user trust and contributes to higher search engine rankings.
10. XML Sitemap and robots.txt
Verify that your XML sitemap is current and submit it to search engines. Also, check your robots.txt file to ensure it’s not blocking any important pages or resources.
11. User Experience (UX)
Consider UX factors such as intuitive navigation, clear calls-to-action, mobile responsiveness, and accessibility. A positive user experience leads to longer visits, lower bounce rates, and increased search engine visibility.
12. Analytics and Tracking
Install and configure web analytics tools like Google Analytics to track important metrics, monitor your website’s performance, and identify areas for improvement.
When Should I Perform an SEO Audit?
Conducting an SEO audit is important to check if your website is set up well for search engines and getting lots of people visiting it naturally. Here’s a crisp and creative explanation of when you should perform an SEO audit:
“Imagine your website is a high-performance sports car racing down the digital highway. Like any car needs regular check-ups to maintain its speed and efficiency, your website needs an SEO audit to ensure it’s racing ahead in the search engine rankings.
So, when should you hit the pit stop for an SEO audit? Well, think of it like this:
1. Start Line
Launching a New Website – When you’re about to unveil your shiny new website to the world, it’s the perfect time to conduct an SEO audit. It ensures your website is built with the right SEO foundations, ready to sprint ahead in search results.
2. Checkpoint
Significant Website Changes – Whenever you make significant updates to your website, like redesigning, migrating platforms, or restructuring content, it’s time for an SEO audit. It helps you catch any issues and maintain your website’s ranking.
3. Mid-Race
Periodic Check-ups – Just like professional race car drivers schedule regular pit stops, you should perform SEO audits periodically. Evaluating your website’s performance, tracking keyword rankings, analyzing user behavior, and staying ahead of competitors is important.
4. Finish Line
Declining Performance – If you notice a sudden drop in your website’s traffic or rankings, it’s like hitting a wall on the race track. That’s the cue for an SEO audit. It helps identify any technical glitches, content gaps, or backlink issues holding you back from victory.
What Factors Affect Your Website’s SEO Performance?
Several factors can significantly impact a website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) performance. Here are some key elements to consider:
1. Content Quality
High-quality, relevant, and original content is crucial in SEO. Create engaging, informative, well-structured content that satisfies user intent and addresses their needs.
2. Keyword Optimization
Conduct thorough keyword research and strategically incorporate relevant keywords into your website’s content, meta tags, headings, and URLs. Ensure the keywords flow naturally and use them sparingly.
3. Website Structure
A well-organized website with clear navigation improves user experience and search engine crawl ability. Use descriptive URLs, create a logical page hierarchy, and have a user-friendly internal linking structure.
4. Mobile Friendliness
With the majority of internet users accessing websites on mobile devices, having a mobile-responsive design is crucial. Optimize your website for various screen sizes to enhance user experience and improve rankings in mobile search results.
5. Page Speed
Fast-loading pages are vital for both user satisfaction and SEO. Optimize images, minimize code, enable browser caching, and use content delivery networks (CDNs) to improve page loading times.
6. Backlinks
Quality and relevant backlinks from authoritative websites can significantly impact your SEO. Aim for natural and organic link-building techniques such as creating exceptional content that others naturally want to link to.
7. User Engagement
User behavior metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and click-through rates can influence your SEO performance. Engage users with compelling content, intuitive website design, clear calls-to-action, and interactive elements.
8. Social Signals
While the direct impact of social media on SEO is debated, a strong social media presence can indirectly affect SEO. Share your content on social platforms, engage with your audience, and encourage social sharing.
9. Technical SEO
Optimize technical aspects like meta tags, headers, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, canonical tags, and schema markup. Make sure search engine bots can easily explore your website and fix any problems related to indexing or crawling.
10. User Experience (UX)
User-centric design and positive user experience contribute to SEO success. Provide a visually appealing, easy-to-navigate website with fast loading times, clear calls-to-action, and mobile responsiveness.
What You Need from a Client Before an SEO Audit?
Before conducting an SEO audit, there are a few essential pieces of information and access that you would typically need from a client. Think of it as gathering the necessary ingredients for a successful SEO recipe. Here’s a crisp and creative list of what you need:
1. Website URL
The client’s website address is like the foundation of the entire SEO audit. It allows you to analyze its current performance and identify areas for improvement.
2. Access to Analytics
Just like a chef needs to taste their dish, you need access to the client’s website analytics. This includes platforms like Google Analytics, which provide valuable data on website traffic, user behavior, and conversions.
3. Search Console Access
Consider this the spice that adds flavor to your SEO audit. Access to the client’s Google Search Console account enables you to analyze organic search data, indexation issues, and search performance..
4. Keyword Research
Keywords are the main ingredients of SEO. Ask the client to provide a list of target keywords they want to rank for or perform keyword research yourself to identify relevant and high-potential keywords for their industry.
5. Competitor Information
Just like a master chef studies their competition, understanding the client���s competitors is vital. Request information about their main competitors, websites, and online strategies.
6. Content Inventory
Content is the dish you serve to search engines and users. Ask the client for a list of their existing content, such as blog posts, articles, product descriptions, and landing pages.
7. Backlink Profile
Backlinks are like the garnish that enhances your SEO efforts. Obtain a list of the client’s current backlinks to assess their quality and identify opportunities for link building.
8. Technical Details
Every chef needs to know their kitchen’s condition. Request technical details about the client’s website, including the content management system (CMS) used, server logs, and any known technical issues.
9. Business Goals
Understanding the client’s business objectives is crucial for aligning your SEO audit recommendations. Discuss their target audience, desired conversions, and any specific goals they have in mind.
10. Previous SEO Efforts
Knowing the client’s past SEO initiatives helps you avoid repetition and build upon what has already been done. Ask for details about previous SEO work, including tactics, strategies, and results.
Tools For SEO Audit?
When conducting an SEO audit, several tools can help you analyze and optimize your website’s performance in search engine rankings. Here are some popular tools
1. Google Analytics
This tool gives you helpful information about the traffic, how users behave, and the conversions on your website.. It helps you track key metrics and identify areas for improvement.
2. Google Search Console
It lets you keep an eye on how your website appears in Google search results. You can identify indexing issues, track keyword rankings, and submit sitemaps for better crawling and indexing.
3. SEMrush
A comprehensive SEO tool that offers features like keyword research, site audits, backlink analysis, and competitor research. It helps you find ways to make your website more visible and noticeable.
4. Moz
Moz provides various SEO tools, including keyword research, site audits, rank tracking, and link analysis. It offers actionable insights to enhance your website’s search performance.
5. Ahrefs
This tool is popular for its backlink analysis capabilities. It helps you explore your website’s link profile, identify new link-building opportunities, and analyze competitor backlinks.
6. Screaming Frog
It’s a website crawler that examines your site’s structure, identifies broken links, analyzes metadata, and assesses on-page SEO elements. It helps you identify technical issues that may affect your search rankings.
7. Yoast SEO
A WordPress plugin that assists with on-page optimization. It provides recommendations for optimizing content, including keywords, meta tags, readability, and more.
8. Google PageSpeed Insights
This tool analyzes your website’s speed and performance on desktop and mobile devices. It provides suggestions to improve page load times for a better user experience.
What Steps You Follow to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit?
Conducting a technical SEO audit involves analyzing various aspects of a website to identify and fix any issues affecting its search engine visibility and performance. Here’s a crisp and creative breakdown of the steps involved:
1. Crawl and Index Analysis
Examine how search engines crawl and index your website. Check for any crawl errors, blocked pages, or indexing issues hindering your site’s visibility.
2. Website Speed and Performance
Assess the speed and performance of your website. Identify any factors, such as large image files or excessive scripts that may slow it down and impact user experience.
3. Mobile-Friendliness
Evaluate how well your website performs on mobile devices. Ensure it has a responsive design, optimized viewport, and fast loading speed for mobile users.
4. URL Structure and Site Architecture
Analyze your website’s URL structure and site architecture. Make sure URLs are user-friendly, descriptive, and organized logically, allowing search engines to understand the hierarchy of your content.
5. Metadata Optimization
Review your website’s metadata, including page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags. Optimize them to be concise, relevant, and compelling, incorporating targeted keywords when appropriate.
6. XML Sitemap and Robots.txt
Check the presence and accuracy of your XML sitemap and robots.txt file. Ensure search engines can access and understand your sitemap while properly instructing them on crawling and indexing restrictions.
7. Internal Linking
Review your internal linking structure to make sure it is well-optimized for both search engines and users. Create a logical linking hierarchy, use descriptive anchor text, and ensure important pages receive adequate internal link equity.
8. Broken Links and Redirects
When there are broken links on your website, it becomes hard for people to move around and explore it. It can also create problems for search engines trying to go through your site. Meanwhile, incorrect redirects can lead to problems with indexing and ranking on search engines.
9. Website Security
Verify that your website has a secure HTTPS connection and is protected against potential security threats. Install an SSL certificate and ensure all sensitive information is transmitted securely.
10. Structured Data Markup
Implement structured data markup using schema.org to provide additional context and information to search engines. This can enhance your website’s visibility in search results through rich snippets and other enhanced features.
11. Canonicalization
Check for duplicate content issues and implement canonical tags to consolidate duplicate pages under a single preferred version. This helps search engines understand the primary version of your content.
12. Analytics and Tracking
Ensure your website has proper analytics tracking in place. Set up Google Analytics or other tracking tools to monitor website performance, user behavior, and conversions.
What is Core Web Vitals Audit?
Core Web Vitals Audit is an assessment and analysis of a website’s performance and user experience based on three key metrics known as Core Web Vitals. These metrics, coined by Google, evaluate a web page’s speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, which directly impact user satisfaction and search engine rankings.
1. Speed (Largest Contentful Paint, LCP)
This measures how quickly the main content of a webpage becomes visible to the user. A fast-loading page ensures a smooth and engaging user experience.
2. Responsiveness (First Input Delay, FID)
FID measures how quickly a webpage reacts when you do something like clicking a button or typing. A low FID ensures users can easily interact with the website without frustrating delays.
3. Visual Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift, CLS)
CLS evaluates how much the content layout shifts during the page load. A low CLS ensures that elements don’t unexpectedly move or shift, preventing accidental clicks and improving the overall browsing experience.
Why Is It Necessary to Consider Core Web Vitals in Your Website Check-up?
Including Core Web Vitals in your audit is crucial because they play a vital role in enhancing user experience and determining the success of your website. Here’s why it’s important, crisp and creative:
1. Speedy Spider
Core Web Vitals are superheroes that make your website faster than speeding spiders. By optimizing metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), you ensure that your website loads responds promptly to user actions, and maintains visual stability.
2. Delightful Delays
Including Core Web Vitals in your audit leads to delightful delays. By reducing LCP (the time it takes for the main content to appear), you ensure that visitors don’t abandon your site due to frustratingly long loading times. Faster loading equals happier users, increased engagement, and improved conversion rates.
3. Swiftly Smooth
FID is the smooth operator that keeps your website responsive and interactive. By optimizing this metric, you prevent annoying delays between user input and website response. Users can navigate effortlessly through your site, clicking buttons, filling out forms, and having a smooth, frustration-free experience.
4. Layout Stability Jedi
CLS ensures your website doesn’t engage in a chaotic dance routine. It measures unexpected shifts in page elements during loading, ensuring that buttons, links, and other interactive elements don’t move unexpectedly and cause users to click on the wrong thing. By optimizing CLS, you maintain visual stability and avoid frustrating users who are trying to interact with your site
5. SEO Sorcery
Core Web Vitals are the secret sauce for SEO success. Search engines like Google have incorporated these metrics into their ranking algorithms, favoring websites with excellent user experiences. By including Core Web Vitals in your audit and optimizing them, you enhance your chances of climbing the search engine rankings and driving more organic traffic to your site.
Screaming Frog for Core Web Vitals Audit
Screaming Frog is a versatile and powerful tool primarily used for website audits. But did you know it can also help to audit Core Web Vitals? Let’s dive into this creative usage!
Imagine you have a website and want to ensure it provides an optimal user experience by meeting Core Web Vitals requirements. Core Web Vitals are like important rules that check how well a website works. They look at things like how fast the website loads, how easy it is to use, and if the content on the website moves around too much.
Here comes the creative part: You can unleash the mighty Screaming Frog to audit these vital aspects of your website! Here’s how it works:
1. Loading Speed (Largest Contentful Paint – LCP)
Screaming Frog can analyze your web pages and provide insights into their loading speed. It identifies the largest content element that appears during page load and measures how quickly it renders. With this information, you can identify and optimize slow-loading elements for better LCP scores.
2. Interactivity (First Input Delay – FID)
FID measures how quickly users can interact with your website. By crawling your pages, Screaming Frog can identify any JavaScript or other resources that may cause delays in user interaction. You can then optimize these resources to improve FID scores and provide a snappy user experience.
3. Visual Stability (Cumulative Layout Shift – CLS)
CLS measures the unexpected layout shifts that occur during page loading. Screaming Frog can help you identify elements that cause layout shifts, such as images or ads without dimensions. By fixing these issues, you can enhance the visual stability of your website and achieve better CLS scores.
Screaming Frog provides a comprehensive overview of your website’s Core Web Vitals performance. It allows you to identify specific issues affecting loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, so you can take targeted actions to optimize your website and provide a delightful user experience.
How Can You Maximize Your Crawl Budget for the Google Search Console?
To make the most of your crawl budget in Google Search Console, you can follow these crisp and creative strategies
1. Optimize your site structure
Ensure your website has a clear, logical structure and well-organized navigation. This helps search engine bots crawl and understand your content more efficiently.
2. Focus On High-Quality Content
Create unique, valuable, relevant content that engages your target audience. By consistently providing high-quality content, search engines are more likely to visit your pages and put them in their search results.
3. Improve Page Load Speed
Optimize your website’s performance by minimizing unnecessary scripts, compressing images, and leveraging caching techniques. Faster page load speed improves user experience and helps search engines crawl more pages within their allocated budget.
4. Use a Proper URL Structure
Make simple and clear website addresses that both people and search engines can easily understand. Avoid using excessive parameters or dynamic URLs that can confuse crawlers.
5. Utilize Sitemaps
Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. This XML file is a roadmap for search engine crawlers, helping them discover and index your pages more efficiently.
6. Monitor and Fix Crawl Errors
Regularly check for crawl errors and broken links using the Crawl Errors report in Google Search Console. Fixing these issues ensures search engine bots can crawl your site without encountering obstacles.
7. Optimize robots.txt File
Use the robots.txt file to control and prioritize the crawling of different sections of your website. You can direct the crawlers toward more valuable content by turning off unnecessary or low-priority pages.
8. Implement Structured Data
Utilize schema markup or structured data on your web pages to provide additional context and make it easier for search engines to understand your content. This can enhance the visibility of your site in search results.
9. Monitor Crawl Stats
Regularly review the crawl stats report in Google Search Console to gain insights into how often and deeply search engine bots crawl your site. This information can help you identify potential crawl budget issues or anomalies.
10. Build Quality Backlinks
Acquire high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to increase your site’s authority and crawl ability. Search engine bots often prioritize crawling pages with strong backlink profiles.
Conclusion
In conclusion, “Unleashing the Power of Technical SEO: A Comprehensive Audit Guide” is an invaluable resource for businesses and marketers seeking to maximize their online presence.
This guide thoroughly examines technical SEO principles and provides actionable steps to conduct a comprehensive audit. By following the step-by-step instructions and implementing the recommended strategies, businesses can optimize their websites for search engines, enhance user experience, and ultimately drive organic traffic and improve rankings.
As the digital landscape evolves, this guide equips readers with the knowledge and tools necessary to stay ahead in the competitive online environment. Embracing the power of technical SEO through this guide is a definitive path toward achieving long-term success in the digital realm.
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Top 18 Best Free SEO Tools for Beginners in 2021
August 31, 2021
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Top 18 Best Free SEO Tools for Beginners in 2021
August 31, 2021
Blogging,
by Sameh Alhammouri
Best Free SEO Tools for Beginners
Here are the best free SEO tools that help your website articles quickly rank on Google. Every blogger and small business website owners should have to use these SEO tools to increase traffic for their website.
These free Search Engine Optimization tools solve your SEO problem and save your time and money. Are you a beginner and you are not ready to spend money on the premium SEO tool like SEMrush. There are lots of free online SEO tools available for website owners. You can use these free tools to get more organic search traffic for your blog. This post will show you how to use it effectively to bring more visitors from Google search.
Let’s take a look at the top free SEO tools in 2021 list below.
The top best free SEO tools for beginners
1. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is one of the best free keyword research tools. If you are using Google Keyword Planner for keyword research, you can try it. You can use Ubersuggest tool for finding related search terms with your main keyword and getting better keyword ideas from competitors’ domain.
Just go ahead to neilpatel.com/Ubersuggest and type your main keyword, for example, digital marketing and then select a country you want to target press enter.
You will get hundreds of long tail keyword ideas with keyword difficulty score and CPC rate so you can easily optimize your articles keywords. If you want to find a competitor google ranking keywords just type your competitor website URL, you will get all keywords they are ranking on Google. You will get all search queries with keyword difficulty score. So this is the best free keyword research tool that help you find low competition keywords rank on Google.
2. SEO by Yoast
Yoast SEO is the best WordPress plugin for both beginners and advanced users. SEO by Yoast suggests on page SEO tips and solutions while you are writing blog post.
If you build your website or blog on the WordPress platform, you can’t ignore SEO by Yoast plugin. Yoast SEO solves your on-page SEO problem before you publish your post. This is a free plugin that comes with all essential features and advanced features like XML sitemap, robot text and more. It’s also available premium version, but free version fulfils all your on-page SEO needs.
It shows the readability score of your article. It is one of the important factors that you should consider when you write a post. The readability analysis uses an algorithm to determine how readable your post is.
It suggests many essential On-page SEO tasks that you have to complete before publishing the post like Focus keyphrase, article word length, internal links, outbound links, Meta description length and many more. If you are using WordPress, Yoast SEO must have a plugin for your site rank on Google and other search engines.
3. Keywords Everywhere
If you want to know keyword volume when you type a word on any search bar, Keywords Everywhere is the tool for you. Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension for free SEO keyword research. This tool will provide keyword search volume more than 15 websites including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Moz, YouTube, Majestic, Amazon & more.
4. Free On-Page SEO Checker
With sitechecker.pro, you can quickly analyze web pages on page SEO and get free reports to fix problems. The sitechecker provides detailed information for site auditing. You can easily find and eliminate errors in meta tags, images, links.
5. Google Trends
When you are looking to build a sensitive content website, Google Trends is the best free tool for bloggers. Google trends will show you current search popularity on topics you are looking. So that, bloggers can easily identify what types of topic and region they want to target when creating a website article.
Using Google trends is a great way to analyze specific search term current trends how likely people interact with related search over the years. Bloggers and small business owners can easily identify what types of topics and region they want to target when they are creating articles to reach local area or specific country.
6. Answer the public
Are you want to know what questions and queries your consumers have? Answer the public is the powerful tool for business who is looking content marketing. Also, it’s best for beginners to get content ideas for their website. Simply put your search terms on the search box and then the tool will give hundreds of question that people ask on the search engine.
7. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tool for bloggers. If you are beginner to blogging world, you must deep dive into this tool, because it makes your blogging career easier.
You should use Google Search Console to get in-depth search queries ranking position and your site errors. It shows lots of information like click-through rate, the average position of the specific search query, internal and external links, top linking text and sites.
It also shows mobile usability and AMP version of the site errors so you can use this free tool you can improve your ranking on Google search page.
8. PageSpeed Insights
High webpage loading time will affect your site rank on Google. You need to eliminate unnecessary script or reduce image sizes. Google PageSpeed Insights tool gives handful report that what factors impact on your page loading in desktop and mobile devices. You can also check your site on tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom Tools.
Web page speed is one of the search engine ranking factor. Improving page load time will help boost SEO performance. GTMetrix is a great tool to analyze your site page load time. And also, you can use Google page speed tool to check your website page speed on the mobile and desktop.
9. Screaming Frog
You want to find and fix technical SEO issues in minutes. Screaming Frog is a free super technical SEO tool. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider software crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script, and apps from an SEO perspective. This program is available for Windows PC or Mac computers so you can download for free. When you put a site URL, it crawls a website instantly and finds broken links, server errors, many other essential technical SEO issues.
10. Siteliner
Duplicate content will affect your site rank on Google. Siteliner is the best tool that scans duplicate content and other SEO problems like blocked pages, messed up redirects and broken links on your website.
11. MozBar
MozBar is a free all-in-one SEO toolbar Google Chrome extension. You can get domain authority and page authority metrics for any website on the SERPs. MozBar is one of the best free competitors analyse tools for beginners, so you are able to access and compare link metrics while viewing search results on the Google.
12. Free Backlink Checker
Analysing backlinks is essential because it helps you find a good and bad sites link to your site. Building quality backlink can boost website SEO. There are many free backlink checker tools available that give overall backlinks data for any websites.
13. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an essential tool that you should integrate with your website. You can easily track your best performing contents, traffic source, adsense earning for each page, geo location of your visitors and other lots of features that you can use for optimizing your site to search engine.
14. Zadroweb.com/SEO-auditor
Zadro SEO Audit Tool provides overall SEO information for your site. It shows Page Authority, Domain Authority, load time, and Google page speed. So you can quickly analyze backlinks and load time issues. It’s gonna give you overall score success, warning and errors. If you see any errors, first you need to fix it in your site.
15. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a free competitor analyze tool, you can get basic data of your site and competitors details with the free version. You can see your site global ranking and country ranking, traffic sources, referral sites detail, top five keywords so lots of detail you can analyze.
16. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Your site has to get ready for Google’s Mobile-first Indexing. You might have heard that Google recently made a significant change to its algorithm. This change is officially called Mobile-First Indexing. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you will lose Google rank on the mobile version. your blog will get less mobile traffic.
17. Animalz Revive
Animalz Revive is a free tool that helps you analyzing old content to refresh. This online tool shows you accurately which posts on your blog needed to improve so you can maintain your traffic or get more traffic.
18.Conclusion
So these are the best and essential free SEO tools you should use every day to get rank number one on Google search page. If you are looking best all in one SEO tool to rank one on Google, SEMrush is the very best SEO tool for you, check out the link in the description.
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Easy and Simple steps to the eCommerce website development process
According to the Nasdaq, by 2040, ecommerce will account for 95 percent of all purchases. Fortunately, we’ve worked out a 13-step procedure that will guide you through the process of creating a successful ecommerce site in no time.
Understanding the market you’re about to enter isn’t enough when it comes to creating an internet store. You should also have a good understanding of branding, site design, and content strategy. This may appear to be a significant lot of labour. We’ve broken it down into 13 steps to assist you streamline your ecommerce development process and achieve your company objectives.
Understand what products you are going to sell
Finding out what you’re going to sell is the first stage in which ecommerce website development company can help you. What piques your interest? Creating an internet store based on your interests leads to a business you’ll enjoy running. Finding your niche doesn’t have to go any further than what you already know, whether you’re into boutique guitar effects pedals, fishing lures, or high-end timepieces. However, many businesses have been started for a variety of reasons. Maybe you notice a gap in a market and want to fill it by offering potential clients goods solutions to their difficulties.
Know about your business model
There are several different types of ecommerce business models, but the two most common are business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) (B2C). It’s critical to understand the distinctions and where your ecommerce business fits in. A good ecommerce developers team can help you know these things better.
Consumer to business (B2C)
The majority of the internet stores we contact with are B2C. (B2C). When we click the checkout button on a B2C website, whether it’s Amazon, Zappos, or Target, we’ve completed a transaction. On a B2C website, products or services are sold directly from businesses to the general public, with no third parties involved.
From one company to the next (B2B)
Businesses that sell to other businesses are known as business to business (or B2B). These are businesses that may produce goods, operate as wholesalers, or provide services and products in a specific industry. A wonderful example of a B2B ecommerce firm is ROOM.
Understand your audience
One benefit of beginning an online business in a niche you’re familiar with is that you already know your target audience since you’re a member of it. Even if you already know your clients, putting forth some effort to gain a better understanding of them is valuable to any ecommerce firm.
Every aspect of the ecommerce development process is affected by knowing who your potential clients are. Everything, including the user experience and user interface, site design graphics, content, and more, must be targeted to your potential clients.
Make a strategy
Content-first design is a favourite of ours. Building a website with genuine information rather than filler results in a more accurate portrayal of the final product sooner in the process. Working backwards and adding images, text, and other aspects later in the process might make things more difficult.
A content strategy is required at the start of the development process. This entails figuring out what kind of material you’ll need to tell your brand’s storey and explain what your products do. This could include writing, images, videos, infographics, and other forms of media that you’ll need to provide the greatest possible service to your consumers.
Think of a good name
Avoid cliches and naming your company anything that is too similar to that of your competitors. You must make an impression. A distinctive name will set you apart from other competitors in the same market.
Make it brief.
Shorter business names are more memorable. Is there any ecommerce site or storefront that has more than one or two words? We’ll give you a second… No, we didn’t believe so. Apple, Etsy, and Google are examples of companies with short names that have stronger brand recognition. People desire something that is simple and easy to remember.
Be unique.
No matter how good a company’s products or services are, a boring, uninspired name might detract from its image.
Purchase a domain name
Okay, you’ve decided on a business name and discovered a suitable URL. Go ahead and register the domain name before you start developing the store. On the internet, things move rapidly, and your ideal URL might be taken at a later point of your ecommerce website development. Now is the time to buy your domain name so you won’t have to worry about it afterwards. You can rely on us.
Determine your branding
Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Apple have been engrained in our common consciousness. These businesses have a stronger connection with their customers than organisations with less established identities, thanks to distinctive logos, visual identities, and ways of speaking. Branding offers firms emotional resonance, turning them from faceless entities into ones with whom we have strong feelings. It’s what makes customers loyal to a brand.
A unique logo, colour palette, and distinct voice are also required for an ecommerce website. All of these diverse web design aspects come together to create a user experience that is guided by the brand’s personality.
Find the right ecommerce platform
When it comes to ecommerce systems, you have a lot of alternatives. You may use Magento, Shopify, or a plugin like WooCommerce with WordPress to manage your ecommerce website. And there are advantages and downsides to the many ecommerce products available. The ecommerce platform you choose to power your own website should include these crucial features:
Responsive design: The ecommerce platform should provide a consistent experience whether visited on a PC, mobile app, or other mobile devices.
Product management: Every step in the process of adding, editing, and tracking inventory should be straightforward. You should be able to offer different variants of a product as well as promotional or sale prices when appropriate.
CMS stands for content management system.
A CMS is required for updating and altering dynamic material such as blogs and news, as well as other recurring content blocks in a design. Having a content management system (CMS) can help you keep your website updated with new content that supports the products you sell.
Shopping cart: Ability to personalise and style a shopping cart so that it blends in with the overall shopping experience. Checkout page: You shouldn’t be trapped with a checkout page that you can’t change or edit, just like the shopping cart.
Payment processing: Have the ability to accept credit card payments as well as electronic payments such as Apple Pay, PayPal, Stripe, Google Pay, and other popular payment gateways.
Knowing your audience is linked to content strategy. What are their most frequently asked questions concerning the things you provide, and what information would be helpful to them? You should answer any simple queries they might have and supply facts that your competitors don’t. For an ecommerce web development site, a content strategy outlines what you’ll need and how best to present it in a design.
Wrap up
The information architecture of your website is shaped by your content strategy. Consider your content to be cargo on a train, and your information architecture to be the tracks that transport it. You must understand what your customers require and how best to deliver the content to them. You must hire ecommerce website developer like Whiz and get the right quotes.
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A 5-step Guide to Improve Your Site’s Technical SEO
Technical SEO is responsible for optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO help, search engines will have no trouble accessing, crawling, interpreting, and indexing your website. In fact, technical SEO is a vital segment of search engine optimizing. If something goes wroth with t, the whole content optimization will fail to generate the expected results.
Understanding how technical SEO works and improving it is important for anyone involved in digital marketing. Performing a technical SEO audit of your website will detect all the problems and fix them in a way that they won’t reoccur. Before all, improving your site’s technical SEO is a process that takes several steps to complete.
Checking the sitemap and indexing
After you get a better understanding of what technical SEO is, you need to review your website’s infrastructure, so to say. If you still haven’t created a sitemap, now is high time to do so. It is responsible for informing the search engine of your website’s content structure, allowing it to discover fresh content.
In general, the sitemap should be clean in the sense that it shouldn’t contain errors or blocked URLs. It should be updated in its entirety every time content is added or removed from the website so search engines would be able to discover novel content fast. Finally, the sitemap should be registered in Google Search Console. This can be done either manually or by specifying its location in the “robots.txt file.”
Once your website’s sitemap is fully functional, it is time to turn to individual pages indexed by search engines. This figure determines the strength of the domain and in ideal circumstances; it should be close to the total number of pages on the site. If the gap is bigger gap than expected, you'll need to go through your disallowed pages.
Crawlable resources
Powerful as it might seem, the “robots.txt” file is just one way to restrict pages from indexing. For instance, JavaScript and CSS files are critical to a webpage’s rendering and they need to be tuned as well. For this reason, you’ll need an SEO crawler used by digital marketing agencies like GWM to run a comprehensive crawlability check.
By using an SEO crawler, you’ll be able to find which pages and resources are restricted from indexing. Once the full list of blocked pages and resources, you’ll be able to fix the ones that aren’t intended to be blocked.
Finally, you should check for orphan pages. These are the pages that exist on your site but feature no internal links. Search engines seldom discover them and even then, they’re likely to crawl them quite infrequently. To check your website for the presence of any orphan pages, you need to rebuild your WebSite Auditor project. After the rebuild, you’ll have no problem listing all the orphan pages.
Restricting indexation and adding URL parameters
Going back to the topic of indexation, there are going to be pages that have zero SEO value. Such pages should have indexation restricted to save on the crawl budget. Usually, these are the pages that you wouldn’t expect to appear in the search results.
If someone types in “hand cream” then they are interested in purchasing this product, not reading about the terms and conditions posted by the manufacturer. The same goes for expired promotions and privacy policies which are both of little or no interest to a visitor. That’s the reason why such pages should be excluded from search results.
Speaking of search results on Google, we have already mentioned the Google Search Console. There is a high probability that Google will crawl the same page with different URL parameters separately. This would result in two pages being portrayed as one, which is not the goal of SEO. That’s why you should add URL parameters to the Search Console to let Google know that it’s the same page so crawling can be performed in a more efficient manner.
Auditing internal links
The more shallow and logical the structure of the website, the better will the user navigate it. A useful navigational tool is internal linking which should be audited from time to time in order to check click depth, broken links, and orphan pages.
A general rule of SEO states that the most important pages should not be more than 3 links away from the homepage of the website. Again, WebSite Auditor will help you determine your website’s click depth. Once you get an overview of all the URLs, determine which links are vital and move them up the chart, to the aforementioned 3 clicks away from the homepage.
Your crawl budget can be put to waste by broken links. More importantly, they trick visitors into eating up your pages’ link juice, i.e. ranking power. The infamous “404 Not found” error is what frustrates visitors the most, so make sure there are no broken links due to a wrong code or temporarily moved pages.
Improving pages’ speed
It is not just our society that seems to have sped up but Google as well. It has officially recognized that the loading speed of a page is a ranking signal. This means that your page needs to load in two seconds or less; otherwise, you’re going to start dropping from the rankings. Another aspect of speed is its impact on UX because pages that are slow to open receive higher bounce rates and their conversion rates aren’t particularly impressive. No wonder then that responsiveness is taking priority in the web design of e-commerce platforms.
Speed should be a top priority because the page’s ranking signal plays a role both for desktop and mobile search results. Checking if your pages are fast enough to pass Google's speed test, use the Content Analysis feature in the WebSite Auditor project. In the case of any pages failing the speed test, study the reason in detail and take the editing tool’s recommendations on how to increase the speed.
There are several techniques to improve your site’s technical SEO but this 5-step guide is more than enough to get you started with. The trick is to find reliable tools, programs, and marketing agencies that will help you facilitate the effort to improve the technical SEO of your website. As our knowledge and understanding of SEO increase every day, novel tactics for improving technical SEO are bound to surface so be sure to follow all the trends search engine optimization.
Get a Free Consultation
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A 5-step Guide to Improve Your Site’s Technical SEO
Technical SEO is responsible for optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With technical SEO help, search engines will have no trouble accessing, crawling, interpreting, and indexing your website. In fact, technical SEO is a vital segment of search engine optimizing. If something goes wroth with t, the whole content optimization will fail to generate the expected results.
Understanding how technical SEO works and improving it is important for anyone involved in digital marketing. Performing a technical SEO audit of your website will detect all the problems and fix them in a way that they won’t reoccur. Before all, improving your site’s technical SEO is a process that takes several steps to complete.
Checking the sitemap and indexing
After you get a better understanding of what technical SEO is, you need to review your website’s infrastructure, so to say. If you still haven’t created a sitemap, now is high time to do so. It is responsible for informing the search engine of your website’s content structure, allowing it to discover fresh content.
In general, the sitemap should be clean in the sense that it shouldn’t contain errors or blocked URLs. It should be updated in its entirety every time content is added or removed from the website so search engines would be able to discover novel content fast. Finally, the sitemap should be registered in Google Search Console. This can be done either manually or by specifying its location in the “robots.txt file.”
Once your website’s sitemap is fully functional, it is time to turn to individual pages indexed by search engines. This figure determines the strength of the domain and in ideal circumstances; it should be close to the total number of pages on the site. If the gap is bigger gap than expected, you’ll need to go through your disallowed pages.
Crawlable resources
Powerful as it might seem, the “robots.txt” file is just one way to restrict pages from indexing. For instance, JavaScript and CSS files are critical to a webpage’s rendering and they need to be tuned as well. For this reason, you’ll need an SEO crawler used by digital marketing agencies like GWM to run a comprehensive crawlability check.
By using an SEO crawler, you’ll be able to find which pages and resources are restricted from indexing. Once the full list of blocked pages and resources, you’ll be able to fix the ones that aren’t intended to be blocked.
Finally, you should check for orphan pages. These are the pages that exist on your site but feature no internal links. Search engines seldom discover them and even then, they’re likely to crawl them quite infrequently. To check your website for the presence of any orphan pages, you need to rebuild your WebSite Auditor project. After the rebuild, you’ll have no problem listing all the orphan pages.
Restricting indexation and adding URL parameters
Going back to the topic of indexation, there are going to be pages that have zero SEO value. Such pages should have indexation restricted to save on the crawl budget. Usually, these are the pages that you wouldn’t expect to appear in the search results.
If someone types in “hand cream” then they are interested in purchasing this product, not reading about the terms and conditions posted by the manufacturer. The same goes for expired promotions and privacy policies which are both of little or no interest to a visitor. That’s the reason why such pages should be excluded from search results.
Speaking of search results on Google, we have already mentioned the Google Search Console. There is a high probability that Google will crawl the same page with different URL parameters separately. This would result in two pages being portrayed as one, which is not the goal of SEO. That’s why you should add URL parameters to the Search Console to let Google know that it’s the same page so crawling can be performed in a more efficient manner.
Auditing internal links
The more shallow and logical the structure of the website, the better will the user navigate it. A useful navigational tool is internal linking which should be audited from time to time in order to check click depth, broken links, and orphan pages.
A general rule of SEO states that the most important pages should not be more than 3 links away from the homepage of the website. Again, WebSite Auditor will help you determine your website’s click depth. Once you get an overview of all the URLs, determine which links are vital and move them up the chart, to the aforementioned 3 clicks away from the homepage.
Your crawl budget can be put to waste by broken links. More importantly, they trick visitors into eating up your pages’ link juice, i.e. ranking power. The infamous “404 Not found” error is what frustrates visitors the most, so make sure there are no broken links due to a wrong code or temporarily moved pages.
Improving pages’ speed
It is not just our society that seems to have sped up but Google as well. It has officially recognized that the loading speed of a page is a ranking signal. This means that your page needs to load in two seconds or less; otherwise, you’re going to start dropping from the rankings. Another aspect of speed is its impact on UX because pages that are slow to open receive higher bounce rates and their conversion rates aren’t particularly impressive. No wonder then that responsiveness is taking priority in the web design of e-commerce platforms.
Speed should be a top priority because the page’s ranking signal plays a role both for desktop and mobile search results. Checking if your pages are fast enough to pass Google’s speed test, use the Content Analysis feature in the WebSite Auditor project. In the case of any pages failing the speed test, study the reason in detail and take the editing tool’s recommendations on how to increase the speed.
There are several techniques to improve your site’s technical SEO but this 5-step guide is more than enough to get you started with. The trick is to find reliable tools, programs, and marketing agencies that will help you facilitate the effort to improve the technical SEO of your website. As our knowledge and understanding of SEO increase every day, novel tactics for improving technical SEO are bound to surface so be sure to follow all the trends search engine optimization.
Get a Free Consultation
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Tips to get the most out of your Learning Management System
LMS, an abbreviation for Learning Management System is most popular among learners. The idea of this system is to manage learning online, preventing the barrier of upstanding educational organizations.
LMS helps students understand what’s expected of them, how they can achieve it and keep learning from multiple sources! So, let’s understand how exactly you can pick the right LMS:
1. Get your objectives straight by understanding your company’s needs and how the needs can differ based on the needs – Are you just looking at online teaching or training or something else too?
2. Pick performance- ‘Based Training’ features LMS because it’s critical to get outcomes from the LMS. Mostly, you’ve got to look for an LMS which helps employees or learners learn and keep up with the required development.
3. ‘Mobile Mandate’ is required because they’re used so frequently by most of the population! In fact, an American adult tends to spend 2 hours and 51 minutes on their mobile daily. Mobile optimization shall help you reach out to a wide array of audiences for engagement.
4. Do look for social media features so that you can simultaneously allow learners and marketers to share content, experiences and so much more!
5. Develop a training approach which will help learners make the most out of the resources available and flourish beautifully!
Once you’ve picked the right LMS, you need to figure out how you’d like to make the most out of the Learning Management System.
1. Make sure all learners are comfortable using LMS
This can be done via deep and extensive engagement with the content available. Once you’re well-read with the content available online, you can guide your learners, remember, you’re a facilitator and you need to know all the content before going for online teaching.
2. Plan LMS- assisted goals
A set plan needs to be decided on for good learning experiences here. Speak with the people involved like instructors, learners, administrators, and others. Find out to what extent you can take LMS technology. Most importantly, milestones must be crossed and appreciated post crossing!
3. Integration of video & smartphones
Learners today have access to everything. Studies have shown a drastic increase in online engagement of people on smartphones than any other device! Also, learners prefer learning via phones than any other device due to its easy availability and portability as well.
If you truly want to help your audiences, make your content available on free platforms like YouTube or make it available on your website, free of cost.
4. Content must be broken in meaningful chunks
The point of LMS is to help people learn at their own pace, not just study it for an examination and forget it! Which is why it’s recommended for you to break down the content in videos which are about 3 minutes long for maximum engagement.
5. Ensure ‘Lesson Planning’ & track learners’ progress
Lesson plans are still relevant in education for a reason, it helps teachers teach in accordance. Also, it helps the teacher to measure goals in the long run – this is the measure of success!
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READ ALSO: 10 Areas That Project Management Students Must Concentrate On
LMS has the ability to ensure administrators can give immediate feedback. You can look at your learners’ attention span and develop content accordingly as well.
Most importantly, you’ve got to ensure students are engaged, but how? Check out well-researched tips for you to engage your learners via LMS for great learning experiences:
Tip 1. Manage and monitor activities
Once you plan your teaching-learning strategy, nobody can stop you from executing it. Managing and monitoring activities involve reporting in order to improve course content, get feedback and so on.
Reports need to comprise of elements like:
Student progress details
Time spent on course content creation
Learner satisfaction statistics
Evaluation and learning outcomes
Tip 2. A vibrant learning environment is a must
You are in the digital world and even education need to comply with it. Good UI/UX designing can help you create a vibrant learning environment. This can be done by elements like easy navigation, use of breadcrumbs, easy loading of the website, exciting color scheme and so on.
Moodle users have experienced about a 60% increase in online engagement of learners via effective remodeling of its UI.
Break the monotony and they’ll never leave your website!
Tip 3. Keep all communication channels open
Students need responses from their teachers, sooner than later! Keep all communication channels like social media, email, chats, forums, etc. open for them.
With open communication, they’ll probe questions with amazing outcomes! You should always have dedicated channels open for feedback and communication.
Tip 4. Encourage engagement
Prioritize it too. Come up with assignments wherein, your learners need to stay engaged, like interact in forums or engage in peer feedback and so on. Gamification is another way. However, one of the best ways to encourage student engagement include:
Creation of quick evaluation tools like quizzes.
Progress bars to be included of learners. It’ll motivate them to get better each day.
Appreciate high performing learners, give badges, awards and more.
Tip 5: Make sure your learners know the system in and out
In order to increase user engagement and to retain them, they need to know the LMS and get used to it! That needs to be done via training modules. You can also have chat options in-case of doubts, a FAQs section and much more!
Make sure you update the content timely. Also, should add new FAQs so that not many queries come to you.
Tip 6. Empower your learners
LMS is not just about learning, there’s so much to it! Help them develop themselves. In-fact LMS offers personality development, growth measuring styles and so much more. LMS is all about encouraging students to do what they want to and flourish, irrespective of going someplace to learn.
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READ ALSO: 5 of the Best Ways to Improve Education System
To Conclude
Obtaining maximum results out of LMS is an ongoing process which requires patience, time and so much effort! Keep updating your website every now and then and content must be fresh at all times.
Your aim as an educator must be to make the content engaging, useful and beneficial for all kinds of learners. Let me know what your thoughts are on this!
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via Screaming Frog
We are excited to announce the release of Screaming Frog SEO Spider version 13.0, codenamed internally as ‘Lockdown’.
We’ve been busy developing exciting new features, and despite the obvious change in priorities for everyone right now, we want to continue to release updates as normal that help users in the work they do.
Let’s take a look at what’s new.
1) Near Duplicate Content
You can now discover near-duplicate pages, not just exact duplicates. We’ve introduced a new ‘Content‘ tab, which includes filters for both ‘Near Duplicates’ and ‘Exact Duplicates’.
While there isn’t a duplicate content penalty, having similar pages can cause cannibalisation issues and crawling and indexing inefficiencies. Very similar pages should be minimised and high similarity could be a sign of low-quality pages, which haven’t received much love – or just shouldn’t be separate pages in the first place.
For ‘Near Duplicates’, the SEO Spider will show you the closest similarity match %, as well as the number of near-duplicates for each URL. The ‘Exact Duplicates’ filter uses the same algorithmic check for identifying identical pages that was previously named ‘Duplicate’ under the ‘URL’ tab.
The new ‘Near Duplicates’ detection uses a minhash algorithm, which allows you to configure a near-duplicate similarity threshold, which is set at 90% by default. This can be configured via ‘Config > Content > Duplicates’.
Semantic elements such as the nav and footer are automatically excluded from the content analysis, but you can refine it further by excluding or including HTML elements, classes and IDs. This can help focus the analysis on the main content area, avoiding known boilerplate text. It can also be used to provide a more accurate word count.
Near duplicates requires post crawl analysis to be populated, and more detail on the duplicates can be seen in the new ‘Duplicate Details’ lower tab. This displays every near-duplicate URL identified, and their similarity match.
Clicking on a ‘Near Duplicate Address’ in the ‘Duplicate Details’ tab will display the near duplicate content discovered between the pages, and perform a diff to highlight the differences.
The near-duplicate content threshold and content area used in the analysis can both be updated post-crawl, and crawl analysis can be re-run to refine the results, without the need for re-crawling.
The ‘Content’ tab also includes a ‘Low Content Pages’ filter, which identifies pages with less than 200 words using the improved word count. This can be adjusted to your preferences under ‘Config > Spider > Preferences’ as there obviously isn’t a one-size-fits-all measure for minimum word count in SEO.
2) Spelling & Grammar
If you’ve found yourself with extra time under lockdown, then we know just the way you can spend it (sorry).
You’re now also able to perform a spelling and grammar check during a crawl. The new ‘Content’ tab has filters for ‘Spelling Errors’ and ‘Grammar Errors’ and displays counts for each page crawled.
You can enable spelling and grammar checks via ‘Config > Content > Spelling & Grammar’.
While this is a little different from our usual very ‘SEO-focused’ features, a large part of our roles are about improving websites for users. Google’s own search quality evaluator guidelines outline spelling and grammar errors numerous times as one of the characteristics of low-quality pages (if you need convincing!).
The lower window ‘Spelling & Grammar Details’ tab shows you the error, type (spelling or grammar), detail, and provides a suggestion to correct the issue.
The right-hand-side of the details tab also shows you a visual of the text from the page and errors identified.
The right-hand pane ‘Spelling & Grammar’ tab displays the top 100 unique errors discovered and the number of URLs it affects. This can be helpful for finding errors across templates, and for building your dictionary or ignore list.
The new spelling and grammar feature will auto-identify the language used on a page (via the HTML language attribute), but also allow you to manually select language where required. It supports 39 languages, including English (UK, USA, Aus etc), German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic and more.
You’re able to ignore words for a crawl, add to a dictionary (which is remembered across crawls), disable grammar rules and exclude or include content in specific HTML elements, classes or IDs for spelling and grammar checks.
You’re also able to ‘update’ the spelling and grammar check to reflect changes to your dictionary, ignore list or grammar rules without re-crawling the URLs.
As you would expect, you can export all the data via the ‘Bulk Export > Content’ menu.
Please don’t send us any ‘broken spelling/grammar’ link building emails.
3) Improved Link Data – Link Position, Path Type & Target
Some of our most requested features have been around link data. You want more, to be able to make better decisions. We’ve listened, and the SEO Spider now records some new attributes for every link.
Link Position
You’re now able to see the ‘link position’ of every link in a crawl – such as whether it’s in the navigation, content of the page, sidebar or footer for example. The classification is performed by using each link’s ‘link path’ (as an XPath) and known semantic substrings, which can be seen in the ‘inlinks’ and ‘outlinks’ tabs.
If your website uses semantic HTML5 elements (or well-named non-semantic elements, such as div id=”nav”), the SEO Spider will be able to automatically determine different parts of a web page and the links within them.
But not every website is built in this way, so you’re able to configure the link position classification under ‘Config > Custom > Link Positions’. This allows you to use a substring of the link path, to classify it as you wish.
For example, we have mobile menu links outside the nav element that are determined to be in ‘content’ links. This is incorrect, as they are just an additional sitewide navigation on mobile.
The ‘mobile-menu__dropdown’ class name (which is in the link path as shown above) can be used to define its correct link position using the Link Positions feature.
These links will then be correctly attributed as a sitewide navigation link.
This can help identify ‘inlinks’ to a page that are only from in-body content, for example, ignoring any links in the main navigation, or footer for better internal link analysis.
Path Type
The ‘path type’ of a link is also recorded (absolute, path-relative, protocol-relative or root-relative), which can be seen in inlinks, outlinks and all bulk exports.
This can help identify links which should be absolute, as there are some integrity, security and performance issues with relative linking under some circumstances.
Target Attribute
Additionally, we now show the ‘target’ attribute for every link, to help identify links which use ‘_blank’ to open in a new tab.
This is helpful when analysing usability, but also performance and security – which brings us onto the next feature.
4) Security Checks
The ‘Protocol’ tab has been renamed to ‘Security’ and more up to date security-related checks and filters have been introduced.
While the SEO Spider was already able to identify HTTP URLs, mixed content and other insecure elements, exposing them within filters helps you spot them more easily.
You’re able to quickly find mixed content, issues with insecure forms, unsafe cross-origin links, protocol-relative resource links, missing security headers and more.
The old insecure content report remains as well, as this checks all elements (canonicals, hreflang etc) for insecure elements and is helpful for HTTPS migrations.
The new security checks introduced are focused on the most common issues related to SEO, web performance and security, but this functionality might be extended to cover additional security checks based upon user feedback.
5) Improved UX Bits
We’ve found some new users could get confused between the ‘Enter URL to spider’ bar at the top, and the ‘search’ bar on the side. The size of the ‘search’ bar had grown, and the main URL bar was possibly a little too subtle.
So we have adjusted sizing, colour, text and included an icon to make it clearer where to put your URL.
If that doesn’t work, then we’ve got another concept ready and waiting for trial.
The ‘Image Details’ tab now displays a preview of the image, alongside its associated alt text. This makes image auditing much easier!
You can highlight cells in the higher and lower windows, and the SEO Spider will display a ‘Selected Cells’ count.
The lower windows now have filters and a search, to help find URLs and data more efficiently.
Site visualisations now have an improved zoom, and the tree graph nodes spacing can be much closer together to view a site in its entirety. So pretty.
Oh, and in the ‘View Source’ tab, you can now click ‘Show Differences’ and it will perform a diff between the raw and rendered HTML.
Other Updates
Version 13.0 also includes a number of smaller updates and bug fixes, outlined below.
The PageSpeed Insights API integration has been updated with the new Core Web Vitals metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift). ‘Total Blocking Time’ Lighthouse metric and ‘Remove Unused JavaScript’ opportunity are also now available. Additionally, we’ve introduced a new ‘JavaScript Coverage Summary’ report under ‘Reports > PageSpeed’, which highlights how much of each JavaScript file is unused across a crawl and the potential savings.
Following the Log File Analyser version 4.0, the SEO Spider has been updated to Java 11.
iFrames can now be stored and crawled (under ‘Config > Spider > Crawl’).
Fragments are no longer crawled by default in JavaScript rendering mode. There’s a new ‘Crawl Fragment Identifiers’ configuration under ‘Config > Spider > Advanced’ that allows you to crawl URLs with fragments in any rendering mode.
A tonne of Google features for structured data validation have been updated. We’ve added support for COVID-19 Announcements and Image Licence features. Occupation has been renamed to Estimated Salary and two deprecated features, Place Action and Social Profile, have been removed.
All Hreflang ‘confirmation links’ named filters have been updated to ‘return links’, as this seems to be the common naming used by Google (and who are we to argue?). Check out our How To Audit Hreflang guide for more detail.
Two ‘AMP’ filters have been updated, ‘Non-Confirming Canonical’ has been renamed to ‘Missing Non-AMP Return Link’, and ‘Missing Non-AMP Canonical’ has been renamed to ‘Missing Canonical to Non-AMP’ to make them as clear as possible. Check out our How To Audit & validate AMP guide for more detail.
The ‘Memory’ configuration has been renamed to ‘Memory Allocation’, while ‘Storage’ has been renamed to ‘Storage Mode’ to avoid them getting mixed up. These are both available under ‘Config > System’.
Custom Search results now get appended to the Internal tab when used.
The Forms Based Authentication browser now shows you the URL you’re viewing to make it easier to spot sneaky redirects.
Deprecated APIs have been removed for the Ahrefs integration.
That’s everything. If you experience any problems, then please do just let us know via our support and we’ll help as quickly as possible.
Thank you to everyone for all their feature requests, feedback, and bug reports. Apologies for anyone disappointed we didn’t get to the feature they wanted this time. We prioritise based upon user feedback (and a little internal steer) and we hope to get to them all eventually.
Now, go and download version 13.0 of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider and let us know what you think!
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The post Screaming Frog SEO Spider Update – Version 13.0 appeared first on Screaming Frog.
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Working on the web usually means you will be working with Google in some shape or form. And seeing as Google Chrome is streets ahead of the competition, designers and developers need to think about how their project will work with the browser. How will it look? What technologies does it support, how secure is it and how will it perform? Fortunately, Chrome provides tools to ensure any site or app will be at its best. DevTools enable designers and developers to gain insight into a web page: you can manipulate the DOM, check CSS, experiment on designs with live editing, debug JavaScript and check performance. (See more about how to use these Google web tools here). But Google offers more than just the browser. It has tools and resources to aid nearly every aspect of your design and development life. Want to know how to improve performance? Lighthouse is here to help. Want to build better performing mobile sites? Then say hello to AMP. Are you looking to build beautiful PWAs? Then Flutter, Material Design and Workbox are ready to step in. The beauty of using Google tools, resources, libraries and frameworks is that you know they will work well with the Chrome browser – the most popular browser on the planet. For more tools, see our web design tools roundup. 01. Lighthouse Performance is a key factor in the success of a site and Lighthouse is Google’s tool for improving the quality of web pages. So how do you use it and what can it do? In its simplest form, you can run Lighthouse from the Audits tab and choose from a selection of options including desktop or mobile, in addition to tick boxes for performance, accessibility and SEO, to generate a final report with suggested improvements. 02. Polymer Polymer is well-known for its work with web components but the project has now expanded its repertoire to embrace a collection of libraries, tools and standards. What’s included? LitElement is an editor that makes it easy to define web components, while lit-html is an HTML templating library that enables users to write next-gen HTML templates in JS. Plus, you will also find a PWA Starter kit, the original Polymer library and sets of web components. 03. APIs Explorer Google has a vast library of APIs available to developers but finding what you need is no easy task. This is where Google’s APIs Explorer steps in to offer a helping hand. There is a long list that can be scrolled through but, for quicker access, there is a search box to filter the API list. Each entry links to a reference page with more details on how to use the API. 04. Flutter Create beautiful apps with Flutter If you are looking to build good-looking applications for mobile, web and desktop from a single codebase then Flutter could be for you. The site is a complete reference to working with and building with Flutter. Haven’t got a clue what to do? The docs take a user from installation to creation, assisted by plenty of samples and tutorials. 05. Google GitHub As most will know, GitHub is the hosting platform/repository to store and share code and files. And happily Google has its own spot on the platform with over 260 repositories to sift through. Use the filter to cut down on your search time and get closer to the repository you want to play with or contribute to. 06. Puppeteer Built in Node, Puppeteer offers a high-level API that enables you to access headless Chrome – effectively Chrome without the UI, which developers can then control through the command line. So what can you do with Puppeteer? A few options are available for generating screenshots and PDFs of pages, automating form submission and creating an automated testing environment. 07. Workbox If you are looking to build a PWA then this is a great starting point. Workbox provides a collection of JavaScript libraries for adding offline support to web apps. A selection of in-depth guides demonstrate how to create and register a service worker file, route requests, use plugins and use bundlers with Workbox. And there is also a set of example caching strategies to check out. 08. Codelabs In need of practical guidance for a Google product? Codelabs provides “a guided, tutorial, hands-on coding experience”. The site is neatly broken down into categories and events, making it quick and easy to find what you want. It includes Analytics, Android, Assistant, augmented reality, Flutter, G Suite, Search, TensorFlow and virtual reality. Select an option and get the code and directions you need to build small applications. 09. Color Tool Pick a palette, any palette Color Tool is a straightforward tool that enables you to create, share and apply a palette in addition to checking accessibility. Users can choose a predefined palette from the Material palette. Simply pick a colour and then apply it to the primary colour scheme, switch to the secondary option and pick again. Finally, pick text colours for both schemes. Alternatively, switch to Custom to pick your colours. Then switch to Accessibility to check all is good before, finally, exporting the palette. 10. Design Sprints The Design Sprint Kit is for those who are learning how to participate in or run design sprints. It looks to cover all knowledge bases, from first-timers to experienced sprint facilitators. Learn about the methodology or jump straight into the planning stage, including writing briefs, gathering data and research, as well as what to do post-sprint. Also includes a host of resources such as tools, templates, recipes and the option to submit your own method. 11. People + AI Guidebook This guide is the work of the People + AI Research initiative at Google and looks to offer help to those wanting to build human-centred AI products. The comprehensive guidebook is split into six chapters covering user needs, data collection and evaluation, mental models, trust, feedback and graceful failure. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises, worksheets and the tools and resources that are needed to make it happen. 12. Google Assistant Google's Assistant does plenty of assisting This is the Google Assistant’s developer platform, offering a guide on how to integrate your content and services with the Google Assistant. It shows you how to extend your mobile app, present content in rich ways for Search and Assistant, control lights, coffee machines and other devices around the home and build voice and visual experiences for smart speakers, displays and phones. 13. PageSpeed Insights PageSpeed Insights analyses web content and then offers suggestions on how to make it load faster. Simply add a URL, hit the Analyze button and wait for the magic to happen. Check the Docs to get a better insight into how the PageSpeed API works and how to start using it. 14. AMP on Google AMP is Google’s tool for creating fast-loading mobile pages that will (hopefully) get to the top of search rankings. Learn how to create fast, user-first sites, integrate AMP across Google products, use Google AMP Cache to make AMP pages faster and monetise AMP pages with other Google products. 15. Google DevTools There's a lot you can do with DevTools Every designer and developer knows (or at least should know) that Chrome comes with a set of tools built directly into the browser. Chrome's DevTools are ideal for inspecting the elements that make up a page, checking CSS, editing pages on the fly and much more. The Elements tab is the introduction to DevTools. It displays the HTML code that makes up the selected page. Get an insight into the properties of each div or tag from the selected page and start live editing. This is perfect for experimenting with designs. Check the Layout – whether you are using Flexbox or Grid – and take a look at related fonts with examples and examine animations. Elsewhere, you can view and change CSS. The Styles tab on the Elements panel lists the CSS rules being applied to the currently selected element in the DOM Tree. Switch properties on and off (or add new values) to experiment with designs. This is the perfect tool for ensuring that everything works as expected before applying any changes to the live design. You can also debug JavaScript, optimise website speed and inspect network speed. Here’s a quick tip you can use to immediately speed up your workflow. Head to the Sources tab, click New Snippet and add frequently used code. Name the code snippet and save. Repeat as needed. Now you can grab this code snippet instead of writing it again. Like every good browser, Chrome is constantly evolving and each new release brings new features. Find out what's happening on the Chrome status platform 16. Material Design Material is a vital piece of design kit Development may be seen as Google’s favoured child but, whatever you are making, creating or building, it needs to look good and give the user an experience that makes them want to use it. Material is a more recent addition to the Google stable but is a design system that has matured into a vital piece of design kit. Like any good design system, it has its own set of guidelines, which you need to look at before stepping into the more exciting stuff. Get an overview of how to use different elements, what Material theming is, how to implement a theme and usability guides including accessibility. Elsewhere, there is an insight into Material Foundation, which includes the key areas of design such as layout, navigation, colour, typography, sound, iconography, motion and interaction. Each category reveals its dos and don’ts and where you should consider caution. To give an idea of what to expect, the Layout category offers sections on understanding layout, pixel density, how to work with a responsive layout including columns, gutters and margins, breakpoints, UI regions and spacing methods to name but a few. Beyond the Design section is Components, which provides the physical building blocks needed to create a design. What’s included here? Buttons, banners, cards, dialogs, dividers, lists, menus, progress indicators, sliders, snackbars (these are brief messages about app processes at the bottom of the screen), tabs, text fields and tooltips. Undoubtedly a comprehensive collection of components. And developers haven’t been forgotten, with details and tutorials on how to build for different platforms – Android, iOS, Web and Flutter. And, finally, there is a page dedicated to a host of resources to help make your chosen design happen.
http://damianfallon.blogspot.com/2020/04/16-of-googles-best-dev-and-design-tools_4.html
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The beginner’s guide to Google Search Console
Features in Google Search Console
Why everyone with a website should use Google Search Console
Google Search Console has been created to easily track the performance of your website. You can get valuable insights out of your Google Search Console account which means that you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also be giving a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing.
Besides seeing this kind of data, you’ll get mail notifications when new errors are noticed by Google Search Console. Because of these notifications, you’re quickly aware of issues you need to fix.
Setting up an account
To start using Google Search Console, you’ll need to create an account. Within the new Google Search Console, you can click on ‘add a new property’ in the top bar:
Add a new property — or a site — to get started
Clicking on the ‘Add a property’ button, you can insert the website you want to add. If you choose the new Domain option, you only need to add the domain name — so without www or subdomains. This option tracks everything connected to that domain. With the ‘old’ URL prefix option you have to add the right URL, so with ‘https’ if you have an https website and with or without ‘www’. For collecting the right data, it’s important to add the right version:
Choose domain if your want to track all your URLs or URL prefix if you want to track specific URLs
When you’ve added a website, you need to verify that you’re the owner. There are several options to verify your ownership. The Domain option only works with DNS verification, while the URL prefix supports different methods. You can find out more about the differences in Google’s documentation: adding a new property and verifying your site ownership.
For WordPress users who use Yoast SEO Company, get the verification code via the ‘HTML tag’ method:
You can easily copy this code and paste it into the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab within the Yoast SEO Company plugin:
After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If everything is ok, you’ll get a success message and GSC will start collecting data for your website.
Features in Google Search Console
Now you’ve set up your account what would be the next step? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! We’ll explore some of the reports and information available in the rest of this article.
Performance tab
Within the Performance tab, you can see what pages and what keywords your website ranks for in Google. In the old version of GSC you could see the data of a maximum of the last 90 days but in the current version, it’s possible to see the data up to 16 months. Keep in mind that the data is available from the moment you set up your account.
If you check the performance tab regularly, you can quickly see what keywords or what pages need some more attention and optimization. So where to begin? Within the performance tab, you see a list of ‘queries’, ‘pages’, ‘countries’ or ‘devices’. With ‘search appearance’ you can check how your rich results are doing in search. Each of those sections can be sorted by the number of ‘clicks’, ‘impressions’, ‘average CTR’ or ‘average position’. We’ll explain each of them below:
The Perfomance overview harbours a ton of information
1. Clicks
The amount of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in the search results of Google. This number can tell something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if just a few people click on your result, your result might not stand out in the search results. It could be helpful to check what other results are displayed around you to see what can be optimized for your snippet.
The position of the search result also has an impact on the number of clicks of course. If your page is in the top 3 of Google’s first result page it will automatically get more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of the search results.
2. Impressions
The impressions tell you how often your website in general or how often a specific page is shown in the search results. For example, in the GSC account of our own website, Yoast SEO Company is one of the keywords our website ranks for. The number of impressions shown after this keyword shows how often our website is shown for that keyword in the search results of Google. You don’t know yet what page ranks for that keyword.
To see what pages might rank for the specific keyword, you can click on the line of the keyword. Doing this for the keyword [Yoast SEO Company], the keyword is added as a filter:
You can query the data in many ways
After that, you could navigate to the ‘Pages’ tab to see what pages exactly rank for this keyword. Are those pages the ones you’d want to rank for that keyword? If not, you might need to optimize the page you’d like to rank. Think of writing better content containing the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.
3. Average CTR
The CTR – Click-through rate – tells you what percentage of the people that have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website. You probably understand that higher rankings mostly also lead to higher click-through rates.
However, there are also things you can do yourself to increase the CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and page title to make it more appealing. When the title and description of your site stands out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result and your CTR will increase. Keep in mind that this will not have a big impact if you’re not ranking on the first page yet. You might need to try other things first to improve your ranking.
4. Average position
The last one in this list is the ‘Average position’. This tells you what the average ranking of a specific keyword or page was in the time period you’ve selected. Of course, this position isn’t always reliable since more and more people seem to get different search results. Google seems to understand better and better which results fit best for which visitor. However, this indicator still gives you an idea if the clicks, impressions and the average CTR are explainable.
Index coverage
A more technical but very valuable tab within Google Search Console is the ‘Index coverage’ tab. This section shows how many pages are in the index of Google since the last update, how many pages aren’t and what errors and warnings caused difficulties for Google indexing your pages properly.
You can see the trends in errors as well
We recommend checking this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. When you get such a notification you can check the error in more detail here.
You may find that errors are caused when, e.g., a redirect doesn’t seem to work correctly, or Google is finding broken code or error pages in your theme.
Clicking on the link, you can analyze the error more in depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again:
Fixed the specific error? Validate it so Google can check if it’s gone for real
There are a few things you should always look for when checking out your coverage reports:
If you’re writing new content, your indexed pages should be a steadily increasing number. This tells you two things: Google can index your site and you keep your site ‘alive’ by adding content.
Watch out for sudden drops! This might mean that Google is having trouble accessing (all of) your website. Something may be blocking Google; whether it’s robots.txt changes or a server that’s down: you need to look into it!
Sudden (and unexpected) spikes in the graph might mean an issue with duplicate content (such as both www and non-www, wrong canonicals, etc.), automatically generated pages, or even hacks.
We recommend that you monitor these types of situations closely and resolve errors quickly, as too many errors could send a signal of low quality (bad maintenance) to Google.
URL Inspection
The URL Inspection tool helps you analyze specific URLs. You retrieve the page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it lives now on your site to see if there are differences. On this page, you can also find more technical info, like when and how Google crawled it and how it looked when it was crawled. Sometimes, you’ll also notice a number of errors. This might be in regards to Google not being able to crawl your page properly. It also gives information about the structured data found on this URL.
The URL Inspection tool gives invaluable insights into every URL on your site
Enhancement tabs
Below the ‘Index coverage,’ you can find the Enhancement tab. Here, you’ll find everything you need to improve how your site performs. It has insights in site speed, mobile usability, AMP usage, and structured data enhancements that might lead to rich results in the SERPs.
Speed
The new speed report is still in its experimental stages, but already an invaluable addition. This report gives a good idea of how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop. In addition, it also shows which pages have issues that keep them from loading quickly. The data is based on the Chrome UX report, so real data of real users. Site speed is a difficult topic containing many moving part, so it’s good to learn how you should think about site speed. You can find the answer here: how to check site speed.
Find out which pages load slowly
AMP
One of the tabs is for all things ‘AMP’. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages: lightning fast mobile pages. If you’ve set up AMP for your website you can check for errors in Google Search Console. Within this section you can see the valid AMP pages, the valid ones with warnings and errors:
Below the chart, the issues are listed. If you click on one of the issues, you can see the affected URLs. Just as in the index section of GSC you can validate your fix if you’ve fixed an issue.
Rich results enhancement tab
If you have structured data on your site, provided by Yoast SEO Company for instance, it’s a good idea to check out the Enhancements reports in Search Console. The Enhancements tab is the place where all the insights and improvements that could lead to rich results are collected. There’s an ever-expanding list of support rich results. As of writing, that list contains:
breadcrumbs
events
faqs
how-tos
jobs
logos
products
reviews
sitelinks searchboxes
videos
All these tabs show how many valid enhancements you have, or how many have errors or warnings. You get details about the kind of errors and warnings and on which URLs these are found. There’s also a trend line that shows if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the start of it.
Here’s an example of a how-to enhancement. You can overlay Impressions to get more context for the stats
The Enhancements reports help you find and fix issues that hinder your performance in search. By checking the issues, reading the support documentation and validating fixes, you can increase your chance of getting rich results in search. We have a more expansive guide on the structured data Enhancement reports in Google Search Console.
Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is like a roadmap to all important pages and posts on your website. We think every website would benefit from having one. Is our Yoast SEO plugin running on your website? Then you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to make sure Google can find your most important pages and posts easily.
Within the XML sitemap tab of Google Search Console you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is located on your site:
We recommend everyone entering the URL of their XML sitemap into GSC to make Google find it easily. In addition to that, you can quickly see if your sitemap gives errors or if some pages aren’t indexed, for instance. Checking this regularly, you’re sure Google can find and read your XML sitemap correctly.
We recommend regularly checking the XML sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you’re including in your sitemaps!
Links
Within the links to your site section, you can see how many links from other sites are pointing to your website. Besides, you can see what websites link, how many links those websites contain to your site and lastly, what anchor texts are used most linking to your website. This can be valuable information because links still are very important for SEO Company.
Find out which pages receive lots of links
Within the internal links section, you can check what pages of your website are most linked from other spots on your site. This list can be valuable to analyze regularly because you want your most important pages and posts to get most internal links. Doing this, you make sure Google understands as well what your cornerstones are.
You can even see how many links individual pages get
Mobile usability
The mobile usability tab within this section shows you usability issues with your mobile website or with specific mobile pages. Since mobile traffic is rising all over the world, we recommend checking this regularly. If your mobile site isn’t user-friendly, lots of visitors will leave it quickly.
Handy tips to improve your mobile pages
Manual Actions
The manual actions tab is the one you don’t want to see anything in. If your site is penalized by Google, you’ll get more information in here. If your site is affected by a manual action, you’ll also get messaged via email.
There are a number of scenarios which can lead to these kinds of penalties, including:
You have unnatural/bought links Make sure from and to your site are valuable, not just for SEO Company. Preferably your links come from and link to related content that is valuable for your readers.
Your site has been hacked A message stating your site’s probably hacked by a third party. Google might label your site as compromised or lower your rankings.
You’re hiding something from Google If you’re ‘cloaking’ (that is, intentionally showing different to content than to users, for the purposes of decieving either of them), or using ‘sneaky’ redirects (e.g., hiding affiliate URLs), then you’re violating of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Plain Spam Automatically generated content, scraped content and aggressive cloaking could cause Google to blacklist your site.
Spammy structured markup If you use rich snippets for too many irrelevant elements on a page, or mark up content that is hidden to the visitor, that might be considered spammy. Mark up what’s necessary, and not everything is necessary.
Security issues
Last but not least: within the security issues tab you’ll get a notification when your website seems to have a security issue.
Search Console: an incredibly helpful tool
Reading this post should give you a good idea of what Search Console is capable of, so I’d like to ask you this: Do you already use Google Search Console for your website? If not, we definitely recommend creating an account so you can start collecting data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!
Read more: How to make your site stand out in the search results »
SEO Company by DBL07.co
source http://www.scpie.org/the-beginners-guide-to-google-search-console/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-beginners-guide-to-google-search.html
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The beginner’s guide to Google Search Console
Features in Google Search Console
Why everyone with a website should use Google Search Console
Google Search Console has been created to easily track the performance of your website. You can get valuable insights out of your Google Search Console account which means that you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also be giving a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing.
Besides seeing this kind of data, you’ll get mail notifications when new errors are noticed by Google Search Console. Because of these notifications, you’re quickly aware of issues you need to fix.
Setting up an account
To start using Google Search Console, you’ll need to create an account. Within the new Google Search Console, you can click on ‘add a new property’ in the top bar:
Add a new property — or a site — to get started
Clicking on the ‘Add a property’ button, you can insert the website you want to add. If you choose the new Domain option, you only need to add the domain name — so without www or subdomains. This option tracks everything connected to that domain. With the ‘old’ URL prefix option you have to add the right URL, so with ‘https’ if you have an https website and with or without ‘www’. For collecting the right data, it’s important to add the right version:
Choose domain if your want to track all your URLs or URL prefix if you want to track specific URLs
When you’ve added a website, you need to verify that you’re the owner. There are several options to verify your ownership. The Domain option only works with DNS verification, while the URL prefix supports different methods. You can find out more about the differences in Google’s documentation: adding a new property and verifying your site ownership.
For WordPress users who use Yoast SEO Company, get the verification code via the ‘HTML tag’ method:
You can easily copy this code and paste it into the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab within the Yoast SEO Company plugin:
After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If everything is ok, you’ll get a success message and GSC will start collecting data for your website.
Features in Google Search Console
Now you’ve set up your account what would be the next step? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! We’ll explore some of the reports and information available in the rest of this article.
Performance tab
Within the Performance tab, you can see what pages and what keywords your website ranks for in Google. In the old version of GSC you could see the data of a maximum of the last 90 days but in the current version, it’s possible to see the data up to 16 months. Keep in mind that the data is available from the moment you set up your account.
If you check the performance tab regularly, you can quickly see what keywords or what pages need some more attention and optimization. So where to begin? Within the performance tab, you see a list of ‘queries’, ‘pages’, ‘countries’ or ‘devices’. With ‘search appearance’ you can check how your rich results are doing in search. Each of those sections can be sorted by the number of ‘clicks’, ‘impressions’, ‘average CTR’ or ‘average position’. We’ll explain each of them below:
The Perfomance overview harbours a ton of information
1. Clicks
The amount of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in the search results of Google. This number can tell something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if just a few people click on your result, your result might not stand out in the search results. It could be helpful to check what other results are displayed around you to see what can be optimized for your snippet.
The position of the search result also has an impact on the number of clicks of course. If your page is in the top 3 of Google’s first result page it will automatically get more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of the search results.
2. Impressions
The impressions tell you how often your website in general or how often a specific page is shown in the search results. For example, in the GSC account of our own website, Yoast SEO Company is one of the keywords our website ranks for. The number of impressions shown after this keyword shows how often our website is shown for that keyword in the search results of Google. You don’t know yet what page ranks for that keyword.
To see what pages might rank for the specific keyword, you can click on the line of the keyword. Doing this for the keyword [Yoast SEO Company], the keyword is added as a filter:
You can query the data in many ways
After that, you could navigate to the ‘Pages’ tab to see what pages exactly rank for this keyword. Are those pages the ones you’d want to rank for that keyword? If not, you might need to optimize the page you’d like to rank. Think of writing better content containing the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.
3. Average CTR
The CTR – Click-through rate – tells you what percentage of the people that have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website. You probably understand that higher rankings mostly also lead to higher click-through rates.
However, there are also things you can do yourself to increase the CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and page title to make it more appealing. When the title and description of your site stands out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result and your CTR will increase. Keep in mind that this will not have a big impact if you’re not ranking on the first page yet. You might need to try other things first to improve your ranking.
4. Average position
The last one in this list is the ‘Average position’. This tells you what the average ranking of a specific keyword or page was in the time period you’ve selected. Of course, this position isn’t always reliable since more and more people seem to get different search results. Google seems to understand better and better which results fit best for which visitor. However, this indicator still gives you an idea if the clicks, impressions and the average CTR are explainable.
Index coverage
A more technical but very valuable tab within Google Search Console is the ‘Index coverage’ tab. This section shows how many pages are in the index of Google since the last update, how many pages aren’t and what errors and warnings caused difficulties for Google indexing your pages properly.
You can see the trends in errors as well
We recommend checking this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. When you get such a notification you can check the error in more detail here.
You may find that errors are caused when, e.g., a redirect doesn’t seem to work correctly, or Google is finding broken code or error pages in your theme.
Clicking on the link, you can analyze the error more in depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again:
Fixed the specific error? Validate it so Google can check if it’s gone for real
There are a few things you should always look for when checking out your coverage reports:
If you’re writing new content, your indexed pages should be a steadily increasing number. This tells you two things: Google can index your site and you keep your site ‘alive’ by adding content.
Watch out for sudden drops! This might mean that Google is having trouble accessing (all of) your website. Something may be blocking Google; whether it’s robots.txt changes or a server that’s down: you need to look into it!
Sudden (and unexpected) spikes in the graph might mean an issue with duplicate content (such as both www and non-www, wrong canonicals, etc.), automatically generated pages, or even hacks.
We recommend that you monitor these types of situations closely and resolve errors quickly, as too many errors could send a signal of low quality (bad maintenance) to Google.
URL Inspection
The URL Inspection tool helps you analyze specific URLs. You retrieve the page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it lives now on your site to see if there are differences. On this page, you can also find more technical info, like when and how Google crawled it and how it looked when it was crawled. Sometimes, you’ll also notice a number of errors. This might be in regards to Google not being able to crawl your page properly. It also gives information about the structured data found on this URL.
The URL Inspection tool gives invaluable insights into every URL on your site
Enhancement tabs
Below the ‘Index coverage,’ you can find the Enhancement tab. Here, you’ll find everything you need to improve how your site performs. It has insights in site speed, mobile usability, AMP usage, and structured data enhancements that might lead to rich results in the SERPs.
Speed
The new speed report is still in its experimental stages, but already an invaluable addition. This report gives a good idea of how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop. In addition, it also shows which pages have issues that keep them from loading quickly. The data is based on the Chrome UX report, so real data of real users. Site speed is a difficult topic containing many moving part, so it’s good to learn how you should think about site speed. You can find the answer here: how to check site speed.
Find out which pages load slowly
AMP
One of the tabs is for all things ‘AMP’. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages: lightning fast mobile pages. If you’ve set up AMP for your website you can check for errors in Google Search Console. Within this section you can see the valid AMP pages, the valid ones with warnings and errors:
Below the chart, the issues are listed. If you click on one of the issues, you can see the affected URLs. Just as in the index section of GSC you can validate your fix if you’ve fixed an issue.
Rich results enhancement tab
If you have structured data on your site, provided by Yoast SEO Company for instance, it’s a good idea to check out the Enhancements reports in Search Console. The Enhancements tab is the place where all the insights and improvements that could lead to rich results are collected. There’s an ever-expanding list of support rich results. As of writing, that list contains:
breadcrumbs
events
faqs
how-tos
jobs
logos
products
reviews
sitelinks searchboxes
videos
All these tabs show how many valid enhancements you have, or how many have errors or warnings. You get details about the kind of errors and warnings and on which URLs these are found. There’s also a trend line that shows if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the start of it.
Here’s an example of a how-to enhancement. You can overlay Impressions to get more context for the stats
The Enhancements reports help you find and fix issues that hinder your performance in search. By checking the issues, reading the support documentation and validating fixes, you can increase your chance of getting rich results in search. We have a more expansive guide on the structured data Enhancement reports in Google Search Console.
Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is like a roadmap to all important pages and posts on your website. We think every website would benefit from having one. Is our Yoast SEO plugin running on your website? Then you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to make sure Google can find your most important pages and posts easily.
Within the XML sitemap tab of Google Search Console you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is located on your site:
We recommend everyone entering the URL of their XML sitemap into GSC to make Google find it easily. In addition to that, you can quickly see if your sitemap gives errors or if some pages aren’t indexed, for instance. Checking this regularly, you’re sure Google can find and read your XML sitemap correctly.
We recommend regularly checking the XML sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you’re including in your sitemaps!
Links
Within the links to your site section, you can see how many links from other sites are pointing to your website. Besides, you can see what websites link, how many links those websites contain to your site and lastly, what anchor texts are used most linking to your website. This can be valuable information because links still are very important for SEO Company.
Find out which pages receive lots of links
Within the internal links section, you can check what pages of your website are most linked from other spots on your site. This list can be valuable to analyze regularly because you want your most important pages and posts to get most internal links. Doing this, you make sure Google understands as well what your cornerstones are.
You can even see how many links individual pages get
Mobile usability
The mobile usability tab within this section shows you usability issues with your mobile website or with specific mobile pages. Since mobile traffic is rising all over the world, we recommend checking this regularly. If your mobile site isn’t user-friendly, lots of visitors will leave it quickly.
Handy tips to improve your mobile pages
Manual Actions
The manual actions tab is the one you don’t want to see anything in. If your site is penalized by Google, you’ll get more information in here. If your site is affected by a manual action, you’ll also get messaged via email.
There are a number of scenarios which can lead to these kinds of penalties, including:
You have unnatural/bought links Make sure from and to your site are valuable, not just for SEO Company. Preferably your links come from and link to related content that is valuable for your readers.
Your site has been hacked A message stating your site’s probably hacked by a third party. Google might label your site as compromised or lower your rankings.
You’re hiding something from Google If you’re ‘cloaking’ (that is, intentionally showing different to content than to users, for the purposes of decieving either of them), or using ‘sneaky’ redirects (e.g., hiding affiliate URLs), then you’re violating of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Plain Spam Automatically generated content, scraped content and aggressive cloaking could cause Google to blacklist your site.
Spammy structured markup If you use rich snippets for too many irrelevant elements on a page, or mark up content that is hidden to the visitor, that might be considered spammy. Mark up what’s necessary, and not everything is necessary.
Security issues
Last but not least: within the security issues tab you’ll get a notification when your website seems to have a security issue.
Search Console: an incredibly helpful tool
Reading this post should give you a good idea of what Search Console is capable of, so I’d like to ask you this: Do you already use Google Search Console for your website? If not, we definitely recommend creating an account so you can start collecting data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!
Read more: How to make your site stand out in the search results »
SEO Company by DBL07.co
source http://www.scpie.org/the-beginners-guide-to-google-search-console/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/614403745307148288
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The beginner’s guide to Google Search Console
Features in Google Search Console
Why everyone with a website should use Google Search Console
Google Search Console has been created to easily track the performance of your website. You can get valuable insights out of your Google Search Console account which means that you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also be giving a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing.
Besides seeing this kind of data, you’ll get mail notifications when new errors are noticed by Google Search Console. Because of these notifications, you’re quickly aware of issues you need to fix.
Setting up an account
To start using Google Search Console, you’ll need to create an account. Within the new Google Search Console, you can click on ‘add a new property’ in the top bar:
Add a new property — or a site — to get started
Clicking on the ‘Add a property’ button, you can insert the website you want to add. If you choose the new Domain option, you only need to add the domain name — so without www or subdomains. This option tracks everything connected to that domain. With the ‘old’ URL prefix option you have to add the right URL, so with ‘https’ if you have an https website and with or without ‘www’. For collecting the right data, it’s important to add the right version:
Choose domain if your want to track all your URLs or URL prefix if you want to track specific URLs
When you’ve added a website, you need to verify that you’re the owner. There are several options to verify your ownership. The Domain option only works with DNS verification, while the URL prefix supports different methods. You can find out more about the differences in Google’s documentation: adding a new property and verifying your site ownership.
For WordPress users who use Yoast SEO Company, get the verification code via the ‘HTML tag’ method:
You can easily copy this code and paste it into the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab within the Yoast SEO Company plugin:
After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If everything is ok, you’ll get a success message and GSC will start collecting data for your website.
Features in Google Search Console
Now you’ve set up your account what would be the next step? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! We’ll explore some of the reports and information available in the rest of this article.
Performance tab
Within the Performance tab, you can see what pages and what keywords your website ranks for in Google. In the old version of GSC you could see the data of a maximum of the last 90 days but in the current version, it’s possible to see the data up to 16 months. Keep in mind that the data is available from the moment you set up your account.
If you check the performance tab regularly, you can quickly see what keywords or what pages need some more attention and optimization. So where to begin? Within the performance tab, you see a list of ‘queries’, ‘pages’, ‘countries’ or ‘devices’. With ‘search appearance’ you can check how your rich results are doing in search. Each of those sections can be sorted by the number of ‘clicks’, ‘impressions’, ‘average CTR’ or ‘average position’. We’ll explain each of them below:
The Perfomance overview harbours a ton of information
1. Clicks
The amount of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in the search results of Google. This number can tell something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if just a few people click on your result, your result might not stand out in the search results. It could be helpful to check what other results are displayed around you to see what can be optimized for your snippet.
The position of the search result also has an impact on the number of clicks of course. If your page is in the top 3 of Google’s first result page it will automatically get more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of the search results.
2. Impressions
The impressions tell you how often your website in general or how often a specific page is shown in the search results. For example, in the GSC account of our own website, Yoast SEO Company is one of the keywords our website ranks for. The number of impressions shown after this keyword shows how often our website is shown for that keyword in the search results of Google. You don’t know yet what page ranks for that keyword.
To see what pages might rank for the specific keyword, you can click on the line of the keyword. Doing this for the keyword [Yoast SEO Company], the keyword is added as a filter:
You can query the data in many ways
After that, you could navigate to the ‘Pages’ tab to see what pages exactly rank for this keyword. Are those pages the ones you’d want to rank for that keyword? If not, you might need to optimize the page you’d like to rank. Think of writing better content containing the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.
3. Average CTR
The CTR – Click-through rate – tells you what percentage of the people that have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website. You probably understand that higher rankings mostly also lead to higher click-through rates.
However, there are also things you can do yourself to increase the CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and page title to make it more appealing. When the title and description of your site stands out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result and your CTR will increase. Keep in mind that this will not have a big impact if you’re not ranking on the first page yet. You might need to try other things first to improve your ranking.
4. Average position
The last one in this list is the ‘Average position’. This tells you what the average ranking of a specific keyword or page was in the time period you’ve selected. Of course, this position isn’t always reliable since more and more people seem to get different search results. Google seems to understand better and better which results fit best for which visitor. However, this indicator still gives you an idea if the clicks, impressions and the average CTR are explainable.
Index coverage
A more technical but very valuable tab within Google Search Console is the ‘Index coverage’ tab. This section shows how many pages are in the index of Google since the last update, how many pages aren’t and what errors and warnings caused difficulties for Google indexing your pages properly.
You can see the trends in errors as well
We recommend checking this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. When you get such a notification you can check the error in more detail here.
You may find that errors are caused when, e.g., a redirect doesn’t seem to work correctly, or Google is finding broken code or error pages in your theme.
Clicking on the link, you can analyze the error more in depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again:
Fixed the specific error? Validate it so Google can check if it’s gone for real
There are a few things you should always look for when checking out your coverage reports:
If you’re writing new content, your indexed pages should be a steadily increasing number. This tells you two things: Google can index your site and you keep your site ‘alive’ by adding content.
Watch out for sudden drops! This might mean that Google is having trouble accessing (all of) your website. Something may be blocking Google; whether it’s robots.txt changes or a server that’s down: you need to look into it!
Sudden (and unexpected) spikes in the graph might mean an issue with duplicate content (such as both www and non-www, wrong canonicals, etc.), automatically generated pages, or even hacks.
We recommend that you monitor these types of situations closely and resolve errors quickly, as too many errors could send a signal of low quality (bad maintenance) to Google.
URL Inspection
The URL Inspection tool helps you analyze specific URLs. You retrieve the page from Google’s index and compare it with the page as it lives now on your site to see if there are differences. On this page, you can also find more technical info, like when and how Google crawled it and how it looked when it was crawled. Sometimes, you’ll also notice a number of errors. This might be in regards to Google not being able to crawl your page properly. It also gives information about the structured data found on this URL.
The URL Inspection tool gives invaluable insights into every URL on your site
Enhancement tabs
Below the ‘Index coverage,’ you can find the Enhancement tab. Here, you’ll find everything you need to improve how your site performs. It has insights in site speed, mobile usability, AMP usage, and structured data enhancements that might lead to rich results in the SERPs.
Speed
The new speed report is still in its experimental stages, but already an invaluable addition. This report gives a good idea of how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop. In addition, it also shows which pages have issues that keep them from loading quickly. The data is based on the Chrome UX report, so real data of real users. Site speed is a difficult topic containing many moving part, so it’s good to learn how you should think about site speed. You can find the answer here: how to check site speed.
Find out which pages load slowly
AMP
One of the tabs is for all things ‘AMP’. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages: lightning fast mobile pages. If you’ve set up AMP for your website you can check for errors in Google Search Console. Within this section you can see the valid AMP pages, the valid ones with warnings and errors:
Below the chart, the issues are listed. If you click on one of the issues, you can see the affected URLs. Just as in the index section of GSC you can validate your fix if you’ve fixed an issue.
Rich results enhancement tab
If you have structured data on your site, provided by Yoast SEO Company for instance, it’s a good idea to check out the Enhancements reports in Search Console. The Enhancements tab is the place where all the insights and improvements that could lead to rich results are collected. There’s an ever-expanding list of support rich results. As of writing, that list contains:
breadcrumbs
events
faqs
how-tos
jobs
logos
products
reviews
sitelinks searchboxes
videos
All these tabs show how many valid enhancements you have, or how many have errors or warnings. You get details about the kind of errors and warnings and on which URLs these are found. There’s also a trend line that shows if the number of issues is increasing or decreasing. And that’s just the start of it.
Here’s an example of a how-to enhancement. You can overlay Impressions to get more context for the stats
The Enhancements reports help you find and fix issues that hinder your performance in search. By checking the issues, reading the support documentation and validating fixes, you can increase your chance of getting rich results in search. We have a more expansive guide on the structured data Enhancement reports in Google Search Console.
Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is like a roadmap to all important pages and posts on your website. We think every website would benefit from having one. Is our Yoast SEO plugin running on your website? Then you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to make sure Google can find your most important pages and posts easily.
Within the XML sitemap tab of Google Search Console you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is located on your site:
We recommend everyone entering the URL of their XML sitemap into GSC to make Google find it easily. In addition to that, you can quickly see if your sitemap gives errors or if some pages aren’t indexed, for instance. Checking this regularly, you’re sure Google can find and read your XML sitemap correctly.
We recommend regularly checking the XML sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you’re including in your sitemaps!
Links
Within the links to your site section, you can see how many links from other sites are pointing to your website. Besides, you can see what websites link, how many links those websites contain to your site and lastly, what anchor texts are used most linking to your website. This can be valuable information because links still are very important for SEO Company.
Find out which pages receive lots of links
Within the internal links section, you can check what pages of your website are most linked from other spots on your site. This list can be valuable to analyze regularly because you want your most important pages and posts to get most internal links. Doing this, you make sure Google understands as well what your cornerstones are.
You can even see how many links individual pages get
Mobile usability
The mobile usability tab within this section shows you usability issues with your mobile website or with specific mobile pages. Since mobile traffic is rising all over the world, we recommend checking this regularly. If your mobile site isn’t user-friendly, lots of visitors will leave it quickly.
Handy tips to improve your mobile pages
Manual Actions
The manual actions tab is the one you don’t want to see anything in. If your site is penalized by Google, you’ll get more information in here. If your site is affected by a manual action, you’ll also get messaged via email.
There are a number of scenarios which can lead to these kinds of penalties, including:
You have unnatural/bought links Make sure from and to your site are valuable, not just for SEO Company. Preferably your links come from and link to related content that is valuable for your readers.
Your site has been hacked A message stating your site’s probably hacked by a third party. Google might label your site as compromised or lower your rankings.
You’re hiding something from Google If you’re ‘cloaking’ (that is, intentionally showing different to content than to users, for the purposes of decieving either of them), or using ‘sneaky’ redirects (e.g., hiding affiliate URLs), then you’re violating of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Plain Spam Automatically generated content, scraped content and aggressive cloaking could cause Google to blacklist your site.
Spammy structured markup If you use rich snippets for too many irrelevant elements on a page, or mark up content that is hidden to the visitor, that might be considered spammy. Mark up what’s necessary, and not everything is necessary.
Security issues
Last but not least: within the security issues tab you’ll get a notification when your website seems to have a security issue.
Search Console: an incredibly helpful tool
Reading this post should give you a good idea of what Search Console is capable of, so I’d like to ask you this: Do you already use Google Search Console for your website? If not, we definitely recommend creating an account so you can start collecting data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!
Read more: How to make your site stand out in the search results »
SEO Company by DBL07.co
source http://www.scpie.org/the-beginners-guide-to-google-search-console/
0 notes
Text
15 Effective Tools and Services You Should Pay Attention To
One of life’s pleasures is discovering when some small action taken yields a highly positive, or even a game-changing outcome. A web designer could spend many hours creating a modern website with old tools. A single new tool or a single new service could cut the time required to do so dramatically and produce an even better result.
There’s no shortage of tools or services that could make a difference. The problem is that there are many hundreds of them. There are far too many to devote the amount time it could take find one that might make your day or prove to be a game changer.
One or more of these 15 top tools and services could easily make your day; which is why we suggest you give each one a good close look.
That said, may your shopping experience be a happy and profitable one.
1. UXPin
UXPin provides designers with a set of advanced prototyping features perfect when designing for all screen sizes. UXPin has also been built for great collaboration, making it possible for everyone on the team to jump into one design and work together in context and in real-time.
These features include:
Easily accessible built-in libraries for Material Design, iOS, and Bootstrap
Hundreds of useful icons, interactive elements, and animated states
Vector drawing tools that enable designers to effectively draw and combine vector shapes to create icons or illustrations
The ability to save code components; thereby eliminating the necessity to redraw patterns over and over
HTML import, in which a web page or page section can be imported to UXPin to support the prototyping effort
Team members have ready access to these and other features in addition to being able to exchange design-related information and feedback with team members and project stakeholders in real time.
Click on the banner to learn more about this powerful labor-saving tool.
2. BeTheme
You’ll find more than a few real time savers among BeTheme’s 40+ core features that range from a huge library of customizable pre-built websites to layout generators, page builders, grid options, and much more.
This multipurpose WordPress theme is fast, flexible, and is an ideal choice whether you’re an experienced designer tasked with satisfying a large clientele or you’re building your first website.
A sampling of Be’s many core features includes:
A library of 500+ pre-built websites. These cover the major website items, 30 industry sectors, and a host of popular business niches.
The powerful Muffin Builder page builder/editor.
Shortcodes, a Shortcode Generator, and a Layout Generator
A Header Builder
A wealth of color, font, and special effects options.
BeTheme is responsive and requires no coding. Click on the banner to browse Be’s library of pre-built websites and learn more.
3. Mobirise Website Builder
The ability to save time and increase productivity often requires breaking with traditional tools and techniques, and sometimes certain services. With respect to tools, the Mobirise website builder exhibits some key differences from traditional website builders.
Mobirise is an offline website builder. You can download it and get started building a site right away.
Mobirise is free for both commercial and personal non-profit use; no strings attached.
A wealth of design aids includes 3000+ website blocks, 200+ home page templates, and 75+ homepage themes.
Google AMP and Bootstrap 4 guarantee your websites will be crazy-fast and totally mobile-friendly.
A host of sliders, tables, calls-to-action, forms, tabs, progress bars, and other goodies.
Mobirise is worth a good, close look. Check it out by clicking on the banner.
4. Uncode – Creative Multiuse WordPress Theme
Uncode is a creative multiuse theme for creatives who need a tool of like this to best serve their needs. Uncode is ideal for building portfolio, blogging, or magazine-style sites or websites for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups.
Uncode’s many features include –
A powerful frontend editor, an advanced grid system, and adaptive image system
400+ Wireframes Sections
WooCommerce and WPML compatibility
The showcase is definitely not to be missed. Click on the banner to see it.
5. LayerSlider
What you get with LayerSlider is a very comprehensive multi-purpose animation builder that powers millions of sites every day.
LayerSlider is responsive, device friendly, and it features a variety of layout options to work with.
Animated page blocks can be used to build even a complete website if you choose.
Everything is drag and drop with an ever growing set of templates to work with.
Click on the banner to discover additional features.
6. Dr. Link Check
This service searches sites for broken and malicious links. It checks for proper URL formatting, server response time, SSL certificate validation and more.
You can schedule automatic checks on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
You’ll be provided detailed information about real or potential problems via email.
Search results are available for export to PDF or CSV formats.
Dr. Link Check detects and highlights problems before serious damage is done.
7. Slider Revolution
Slider Revolution 6 is truly a powerhouse website content builder. It could really be a game changer if your websites have begun to exhibit a certain degree of sameness that you would love to break free of.
Create sliders, carousels, and content modules galore, and even full websites.
Create exciting, dynamic solutions to everyday design problems with Slider Revolution’s cutting edge designs.
Dig into the 2000+ royalty-free media assets to find something for every need.
8. 8b Website Builder
Here are three good reasons to give the 8b website builder a closer look (there are of course more!).
8b is new and super easy to work with thanks to its slick, modern interface
You can work with 8b on your desktop, your mobile device, or both
8b is free – at least for the moment.
Other reasons include fast Google ranking and lightning-fast website performance, plus your websites will always be 100% mobile-friendly.
9. Stockfresh
Spending hours looking for a special type of image and paying too much for it once you find it is not a good way to save money; or save time for that matter. Stockfresh is a stock photo agency that can do both.
Stockfresh has an inventory of millions of photos and images
The material offered is broken down into 30 categories
Prices are competitive
There are more offerings to come
10. XStore | Multi-Purpose WooCommerce WordPress Theme
XStore is a king-size WooCommerce theme that has managed to make e-commerce easily. If you’re looking for a potential game-changer you may not have to look further. XStore’s key benefits include –
A single product page builder
A page importer
Plugins valued at just over $300
More than 90 good-to-go shops
Plus a few more useful, time-saving goodies.
11. Heroic KB – Knowledge Base Plugin
Many sites have decent FAQ pages, but they are definitely in the minority. FAQ pages have in fact become somewhat old school, especially when compared to what a powerful knowledge base can do to boost business.
With the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin –
Customers can get good, solid, accurate answers to their questions 24/7
Website owners receive useful article feedback and actionable analytics
Plus, Heroic Knowledge Base integrates with your theme right out of the box.
12. Rank Math
You can totally stress yourself out trying to make your website as SEO friendly as possible, and “as possible” isn’t always good enough. Maybe, it’s time to let Rank Math do the heavy SEO lifting for you.
Rank Math, with its cool, clean and simple UI can provide
Automated image, WooCommerce, and Local SEO solutions
Content Analysis for SEO
Sitemap and redirection solutions
Click on the banner to learn more about this powerful and effective SEO tool.
13. Movedo Theme
This premium quality theme by a top-rated author, in addition to featuring a clean modern design to work with, holds more than a few surprises in store for its users – including
Easy import functionalities
Responsiveness and flexibility,
A knowledge base with a quick search option that’s designed for easy browsing
Out-of-this-world parallax and special scrolling effects
Quality 24/7 support
Summing it up – Movedo rocks!
14. WHATFONTIS
If you’re having a string of sleepless nights because you’ve come across just the right font for a particular need, but you don’t know its name or where to find it, we suggest turning to WhatFontis for help.
This amazing pattern recognition-based font identification service can
Exactly identify your downloaded sample font
Find close matches
Find a satisfactory alternative that’s available at a lower price or for free
Or, all the above.
15. Goodiewebsite
Goodiewebsite is a frontend development platform that connects business owners and web designers with highly competent, experienced web developers. This service is best for –
Small or local business owners who want to establish or improve upon their online presence
Startups wanting to provide a testing platform for their ideas
Web designers seeking a development partner
Goodiewebsite specializes in 1-10 page websites, WordPress websites and simple eCommerce sites.
*****
Any website building tool or service that can help you speed up your workflow or save you money is worth a close look. Some of the tools and services you’re currently using have performed well in the past but are getting a little long in the tooth. You might be more than just pleasantly surprised if you were to put one or more of the above 15 top tools and services into play. As they are among the very best choices for their respective types, any one could prove to be a game changer for you or your business.
The post 15 Effective Tools and Services You Should Pay Attention To appeared first on WebAppers.
15 Effective Tools and Services You Should Pay Attention To published first on https://johnellrod.weebly.com/
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Android Weekly: What’s Coming in Android Q (and Some Other Stuff)
There was a lot of movement in the Android world the week of March 8th thru 15th. The Q beta landed with all sorts of new features, Vivo showed off a portless phone, and Google killed a bunch of services.
Android Q Feature Roundup
Let’s start with the biggest Android news for the week, shall we? The Q beta landed for all Pixel devices, and it’s jam-packed with all sorts of new features. Android Police and 9to5Google both did an incredible job of covering all the new stuff as it showed up—here’s everything so far.
The Android Q Beta is here. For Pixel phones, anyway. [Android Developers Blog]
The word on the street is that Q is also going to hit even more devices during the beta and developer previews this year. [Android Police]
With the upcoming demise of Google+, the Android Beta community has been moved to Reddit. [Android Police]
Android Q has a built-in screen recorder! But apparently, it’s broken right now. [9to5Google, Android Police]
There are more haptic feedback vibrations in Android Q. Okay then! [9to5Google]
Foldable phones are coming. Q is ready. [Android Police]
The always-on display in Q got a bit of a makeover. [9to5Google]
The Files app is all new, with an updated look and some nifty new features. [Android Police]
Google is cracking down on undocumented APIs to make Q more secure. [Android Police]
The sharing menu is getting faster and less crappy. Finally! [9to5Google]
Thanks to some ART enhancements, apps launching should be faster. [Android Police]
Android Q has a desktop mode! Which is…kind of confusing. Why does Android Q have a desktop mode? [XDA Developers]
Pixel Launcher on Android Q will let you replace removed items with a new undo feature. [Android Police]
Dual SIM and standby support on the Pixel 3 is live in Q. [XDA Developers]
There’s a little bell icon for new notifications now, so you can tell which one just pinged. That’s useful! [9to5Google]
You can share your Wi-Fi password with a QR code. [Android Police]
Remaining battery shows an estimated time in the shade now. [Android Police]
You can only dismiss notifications by swiping to the right in Q—the left is the action menu. Oof. [9to5Google]
So many new privacy features. [Android Police]
Accent colors and new icons shapes are tucked into Q’s Developer Options menu. Are more customization options incoming? [Android Police]
You can switch the audio source from the notification shade. [9to5Google]
Rounded corners and the notch show up in screenshots in Q. Yuck. [Android Police]
There are more options when you long-press a notification, which is neat. [Android Police]
Third-party camera apps have access to depth effects and more. [Engadget]
Call screening and emergency information apps are now part of Android’s Default Apps menu. Third-party options don’t exist yet, so this is telling. [Android Police]
Background clipboard access is blocked in Android Q, which probably means bad things for clipboard managers. [XDA Developers]
Smart Home and IoT connections are getting simpler in Q. [Android Police]
Battery Saver is more dynamic in Q, with the option to automatically activate based on usage. [Android Police]
There’s a new series of options called “Feature Flags” that lets users tweak all sorts of stuff. [9to5Google]
You can see all your disabled notifications in one place in Q. [Android Police]
It looks like Google is planning six betas in total, with the final release in Q3 of 2019. [XDA Developers]
In what’s sure to make some users upset, the Magisk dev says that Q could mean bad things for root access. Uh-oh. [9to5Google]
Vivo’s Portless Phone Shows Its Stuff
Chinese phone manufacturer Vivo showed off an absolutely gorgeous portless concept phone to a group of writers in Hong Kong. The shell of the phone is a unibody piece of glass—apparently, Vivo had to come up with a special production method to form, cut, grind, and polish a single piece of glass for the body of this phone. It’s wild.
You can read more about this forward-thinking handset at The Verge and Engadget.
Samsung Galaxy S10 Updates (And More)
All sorts of stuff happened with Samsung’s newest flagship this week. Some good, some bad. Some just neat. Here’s you go.
If you hate the S10’s hole punch camera cutout, these are the wallpapers for you. [XDA Developers]
Samsung pushes the one-handed gesture navigation app from One UI to the Play Store. This means it can be updated independently of the OS. Nice. [Android Police]
S10 owners can get six months of free Spotify Premium. The downside? Spotify is pre-installed on all S10s. You win some, you lose some. [The Verge]
Speaking of free stuff for S10 owners, they also get four months of YouTube Premium. Yay for no ads! [9to5Google]
In slightly less pleasant news, the S10’s face unlock feature easily can be fooled by a picture because Samsung removed the retina scanner. Ouch. [Android Police]
Verizon started pushing Android 9 Pie with One UI to the Note 9. Better late than never, I guess. [Android Police]
Similarly, Android Pie started hitting the Galaxy A+ this week, too. [XDA Developers]
Samsung wants to make a “perfect full-screen” phone with no cutouts or notches. Interesting. [Engadget]
What’s New with Google This Week
Google announced some stuff, killed some stuff, and maybe killed some other stuff. This is everything that isn’t the Android Q Beta.
Finally, Google released an Android Q feedback app. [9to5Google]
Google Fit is getting more battery efficient on Wear OS. All three of you who use Fit and Wear OS better be grateful. [9to5Google]
Google Home Hub and other Assistant smart displays finally got continued conversations. Finally. [Android Police]
Google teased its upcoming game streaming service. It’s going to announce plans at GDC next week. Exciting stuff. [Google on Twitter]
Speaking of, Google filed a patent for a game controller. [The Verge]
If you subscribe to Google Fi and bring your existing number and device, you get a free month of service. That’s better than a not free month of service if you ask me. [Android Police]
Deaths: Allo, goo.gl URL shortener, Inbox, and Google+. RIP, those things. [9to5Google]
Third-party Google Assistant speakers are getting phone calls. [Android Police]
Google shut down part of its hardware division focused on tablets and laptops, which is troubling. [9to5Google]
If you use Google One and pay for 2TB of storage, Google probably wants to give you a free Home Mini. [Android Police]
Google’s Lookout app for the visually impaired is now available for download…assuming you have a Pixel device, anyway. [The Verge, Google Play]
The Drive mobile apps got a facelift to match the web UI. It’s pretty. [Engadget]
Google Maps is getting more features from Waze, like speed trap and crash reporting. Nice. [9to5Google]
Good news: An adware app had almost 150 million downloads before Google realized it and pulled it from the Play Store. Also, I think I need to work on my definition of “good news.” [The Verge]
Chrome’s data saver on mobile now works on HTTPS sites, which is like 80% of the web at this point. I think that really is good news. [Android Police]
Shared Libraries on Photos moved to a more obscure place that still kinda makes sense? [Android Police]
Device Updates, App Updates, and Everything Else
There were a couple of major app updates this week, along with some minor device updates. Also, RED said some stuff about the Hydrogen One that pretty much confused everyone.
Pushbullet got a major update that brings bundled notification, quick replies, and some other stuff. [Android Police]
Facebook is testing a blindingly-white interface in its Android app. I’m sure that’s going to go over well if it gets released. [XDA Developers]
Spotify is testing an option to let users disable its dumbest feature: canvas videos. Good. [9to5Google]
Microsoft’s My Phone feature in Windows 10 is getting screen mirroring. [The Verge]
The Xiami Redmi Note 7 got its first MIUI update, which brings a low-light camera mode. [XDA Developers]
The NVIDIA SHIELD got a small update that brings Xbox Elite Controller support and some other stuff. [9to5Google]
You know the little dinosaur you see in Chrome when it’s offline? Well, you can buy a real one now. I need it. [Dead Zebra]
RED pulled the add-on modules for the Hydrogen One, then said some confusing stuff. [Android Police]
The Xiaomi Mi 8 got official LineageOS support. [XDA Developers]
T-Mobile’s OnePlus 6T got RCS messaging. So it begins. [9to5Google]
Firefox Fenix got its initial release. It looks neat. [Techdows]
Root Stuff: The 2015 Amazon Fire TV got rooted again. Go modders, go. [XDA Developers]
Root Stuff: GravityBox can be installed on Android Pie devices running the Xposed framework now. [XDA Developers]
Some details about Motorola upcoming Razr folding phone leaked. Curiously, it’s said to be using a Snapdragon 710 processor. Weird. [XDA Developers]
That’s a lot of stuff, but that’s how it goes in Google’s world. Something is always happening.
Android Weekly: What’s Coming in Android Q (and Some Other Stuff) published first on https://medium.com/@CPUCHamp
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There was a lot of movement in the Android world the week of March 8th thru 15th. The Q beta landed with all sorts of new features, Vivo showed off a portless phone, and Google killed a bunch of services.
Android Q Feature Roundup
Let’s start with the biggest Android news for the week, shall we? The Q beta landed for all Pixel devices, and it’s jam-packed with all sorts of new features. Android Police and 9to5Google both did an incredible job of covering all the new stuff as it showed up—here’s everything so far.
The Android Q Beta is here. For Pixel phones, anyway. [Android Developers Blog]
The word on the street is that Q is also going to hit even more devices during the beta and developer previews this year. [Android Police]
With the upcoming demise of Google+, the Android Beta community has been moved to Reddit. [Android Police]
Android Q has a built-in screen recorder! But apparently, it’s broken right now. [9to5Google, Android Police]
There are more haptic feedback vibrations in Android Q. Okay then! [9to5Google]
Foldable phones are coming. Q is ready. [Android Police]
The always-on display in Q got a bit of a makeover. [9to5Google]
The Files app is all new, with an updated look and some nifty new features. [Android Police]
Google is cracking down on undocumented APIs to make Q more secure. [Android Police]
The sharing menu is getting faster and less crappy. Finally! [9to5Google]
Thanks to some ART enhancements, apps launching should be faster. [Android Police]
Android Q has a desktop mode! Which is…kind of confusing. Why does Android Q have a desktop mode? [XDA Developers]
Pixel Launcher on Android Q will let you replace removed items with a new undo feature. [Android Police]
Dual SIM and standby support on the Pixel 3 is live in Q. [XDA Developers]
There’s a little bell icon for new notifications now, so you can tell which one just pinged. That’s useful! [9to5Google]
You can share your Wi-Fi password with a QR code. [Android Police]
Remaining battery shows an estimated time in the shade now. [Android Police]
You can only dismiss notifications by swiping to the right in Q—the left is the action menu. Oof. [9to5Google]
So many new privacy features. [Android Police]
Accent colors and new icons shapes are tucked into Q’s Developer Options menu. Are more customization options incoming? [Android Police]
You can switch the audio source from the notification shade. [9to5Google]
Rounded corners and the notch show up in screenshots in Q. Yuck. [Android Police]
There are more options when you long-press a notification, which is neat. [Android Police]
Third-party camera apps have access to depth effects and more. [Engadget]
Call screening and emergency information apps are now part of Android’s Default Apps menu. Third-party options don’t exist yet, so this is telling. [Android Police]
Background clipboard access is blocked in Android Q, which probably means bad things for clipboard managers. [XDA Developers]
Smart Home and IoT connections are getting simpler in Q. [Android Police]
Battery Saver is more dynamic in Q, with the option to automatically activate based on usage. [Android Police]
There’s a new series of options called “Feature Flags” that lets users tweak all sorts of stuff. [9to5Google]
You can see all your disabled notifications in one place in Q. [Android Police]
It looks like Google is planning six betas in total, with the final release in Q3 of 2019. [XDA Developers]
In what’s sure to make some users upset, the Magisk dev says that Q could mean bad things for root access. Uh-oh. [9to5Google]
Vivo’s Portless Phone Shows Its Stuff
Chinese phone manufacturer Vivo showed off an absolutely gorgeous portless concept phone to a group of writers in Hong Kong. The shell of the phone is a unibody piece of glass—apparently, Vivo had to come up with a special production method to form, cut, grind, and polish a single piece of glass for the body of this phone. It’s wild.
You can read more about this forward-thinking handset at The Verge and Engadget.
Samsung Galaxy S10 Updates (And More)
All sorts of stuff happened with Samsung’s newest flagship this week. Some good, some bad. Some just neat. Here’s you go.
If you hate the S10’s hole punch camera cutout, these are the wallpapers for you. [XDA Developers]
Samsung pushes the one-handed gesture navigation app from One UI to the Play Store. This means it can be updated independently of the OS. Nice. [Android Police]
S10 owners can get six months of free Spotify Premium. The downside? Spotify is pre-installed on all S10s. You win some, you lose some. [The Verge]
Speaking of free stuff for S10 owners, they also get four months of YouTube Premium. Yay for no ads! [9to5Google]
In slightly less pleasant news, the S10’s face unlock feature easily can be fooled by a picture because Samsung removed the retina scanner. Ouch. [Android Police]
Verizon started pushing Android 9 Pie with One UI to the Note 9. Better late than never, I guess. [Android Police]
Similarly, Android Pie started hitting the Galaxy A+ this week, too. [XDA Developers]
Samsung wants to make a “perfect full-screen” phone with no cutouts or notches. Interesting. [Engadget]
What’s New with Google This Week
Google announced some stuff, killed some stuff, and maybe killed some other stuff. This is everything that isn’t the Android Q Beta.
Finally, Google released an Android Q feedback app. [9to5Google]
Google Fit is getting more battery efficient on Wear OS. All three of you who use Fit and Wear OS better be grateful. [9to5Google]
Google Home Hub and other Assistant smart displays finally got continued conversations. Finally. [Android Police]
Google teased its upcoming game streaming service. It’s going to announce plans at GDC next week. Exciting stuff. [Google on Twitter]
Speaking of, Google filed a patent for a game controller. [The Verge]
If you subscribe to Google Fi and bring your existing number and device, you get a free month of service. That’s better than a not free month of service if you ask me. [Android Police]
Deaths: Allo, goo.gl URL shortener, Inbox, and Google+. RIP, those things. [9to5Google]
Third-party Google Assistant speakers are getting phone calls. [Android Police]
Google shut down part of its hardware division focused on tablets and laptops, which is troubling. [9to5Google]
If you use Google One and pay for 2TB of storage, Google probably wants to give you a free Home Mini. [Android Police]
Google’s Lookout app for the visually impaired is now available for download…assuming you have a Pixel device, anyway. [The Verge, Google Play]
The Drive mobile apps got a facelift to match the web UI. It’s pretty. [Engadget]
Google Maps is getting more features from Waze, like speed trap and crash reporting. Nice. [9to5Google]
Good news: An adware app had almost 150 million downloads before Google realized it and pulled it from the Play Store. Also, I think I need to work on my definition of “good news.” [The Verge]
Chrome’s data saver on mobile now works on HTTPS sites, which is like 80% of the web at this point. I think that really is good news. [Android Police]
Shared Libraries on Photos moved to a more obscure place that still kinda makes sense? [Android Police]
Device Updates, App Updates, and Everything Else
There were a couple of major app updates this week, along with some minor device updates. Also, RED said some stuff about the Hydrogen One that pretty much confused everyone.
Pushbullet got a major update that brings bundled notification, quick replies, and some other stuff. [Android Police]
Facebook is testing a blindingly-white interface in its Android app. I’m sure that’s going to go over well if it gets released. [XDA Developers]
Spotify is testing an option to let users disable its dumbest feature: canvas videos. Good. [9to5Google]
Microsoft’s My Phone feature in Windows 10 is getting screen mirroring. [The Verge]
The Xiami Redmi Note 7 got its first MIUI update, which brings a low-light camera mode. [XDA Developers]
The NVIDIA SHIELD got a small update that brings Xbox Elite Controller support and some other stuff. [9to5Google]
You know the little dinosaur you see in Chrome when it’s offline? Well, you can buy a real one now. I need it. [Dead Zebra]
RED pulled the add-on modules for the Hydrogen One, then said some confusing stuff. [Android Police]
The Xiaomi Mi 8 got official LineageOS support. [XDA Developers]
T-Mobile’s OnePlus 6T got RCS messaging. So it begins. [9to5Google]
Firefox Fenix got its initial release. It looks neat. [Techdows]
Root Stuff: The 2015 Amazon Fire TV got rooted again. Go modders, go. [XDA Developers]
Root Stuff: GravityBox can be installed on Android Pie devices running the Xposed framework now. [XDA Developers]
Some details about Motorola upcoming Razr folding phone leaked. Curiously, it’s said to be using a Snapdragon 710 processor. Weird. [XDA Developers]
That’s a lot of stuff, but that’s how it goes in Google’s world. Something is always happening.
via How-To Geek
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Technical SEO Checklist – The Roadmap to a Complete Technical SEO Audit
While technical SEO is a topic that only some of us make use of rigorously, it is a part of everybody’s life. Well, which part of SEO is not technical if we were to look at it thoroughly?
SEO issues, mistakes, tips and recommendations are all included in today’s technical checklist. We wanted to cover, in the most effective way possible, all the elements that are important for making your website user-friendly, efficient, visible in SERP, functional and easy to understand. Therefore, gather all the information you have on your site and let’s get better.
I. Website Loading Speed Time
Improve Server Response Time
Optimize & Reduce Image Size Without Affecting the Visual Appearance
Minimize the Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS
Limit the Number of Resources & HTTP Requests
Set a Browser Cache Policy
Reduce the Number of Redirects & Eliminate Redirect Loop
Avoid Loading Your Site With Too Much Stuff
II. Website Functionality & Usability
Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Friendly
Build Search Engine Friendly URLs
Use the Secure Protocol – HTTPs
Set Preferred Version
Set up Correctly the 301 Redirects After Site Migration
Make Sure Your Resources Are Crawlable
Test Your Robots.Txt File to Show Google the Right Content
Verify the Indexed Content
Review Your Sitemap to Avoid Being Outdated
Review Blocked Resources (Hashbang URLs) with Fetch as Google
Optimize Your Crawl Budget
Avoid Meta Refresh for Moving a Site
Use Redirect for Flash Site to the HTML Version
Use Hreflang for Language and Regional URLs
Make Sure Your Tracking Is Working Properly
III. Content Optimization
Reidrect/Replace Broken Links & Resources
Audit Internal Links to Improve Your Chances to Rank Higher
Get Rid of Duplicate Content
Use Structured Data to Highlight Your Content
Keep a Reasonable Number of Links On-Page
Avoid Canonicalizing Blog Pages to the Root of the Blog
IV. User-Friendlier Website
Set up Your AMP the Right Way – Mobile Friendlier
Add Breadcrumbs for a Better Navigation
Test On as Many Platforms and Devices as Possible
I. Website Loading Speed Time
On the web, time is of the essence. Websites all around the world load pretty slow, with an average of 19 seconds to load on a 3G mobile network. Testing has confirmed that around 50% of users abandon a website if it doesn’t load faster than 3 seconds, on average.
If your website loads slowly, you can lose a lot of visitors.
Disclaimer & Warning: Playing with PHP, servers, databases, compression, minification and other similar things can really mess up your website if you don’t know what you’re doing. Make sure you have a proper backup of the files and the database before you start playing with these options.
When we talk about speed, there are a few things we need to consider for making your site efficient and easy to access for your users. A faster loading speed time means higher conversion and lower bounce rates. For that, we’ve selected some mandatory speed optimization suggestions. Using Google’s Speed Test, you can perform easy and short analyses of your website’s loading speed time.
The tool has improved over the years and now you can see helpful charts for large websites to understand how each website is performing. One example is the Page Load Distributions.
The Page Load Distribution uses two user-centric performance metrics: first, contentful paint (FCP) and DOMContentLoaded (DCL). The contentful paint marks the first bit of content there is on the screen when the browser starts to render pixels. The DOMContentLoaded marks the moment when the DOM is ready and there are no stylesheets that are blocking JavaScript execution. These two metrics show exactly which percentage of the content loads faster and the one that needs improvement by looking at those pages with average and slow speed (if you follow the chart).
Another example includes the speed and optimization indicators which show where each website is situated. In the picture showed below, we can see the FCP and DCP score. These two metrics use the data from the Chrome User Experience. It indicates the page’s median FCP (1.8s) and DCL (1.6s) ranks it in the middle third of all pages. That means this page has a low level of optimization because most of its resources are render-blocking.
1. Improve Server Response Time
Server response time refers to the period of time it takes to load the HTML code to begin rendering the page from your server. Basicaly, when a you access a page, it sends a message to the server and the time it take to show you that information is considered to be the server response time.
There are lots of reasons why a website has a slow response time. Google announces just some of them:
There are dozens of potential factors which may slow down the response of your server: slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation, or memory starvation. Google Developers
The server response time depends on how much time the Googlebot needs to access the data. Be it 1, 2 ,3 seconds or more, it will convert your visitor or not. Google says that you should keep the server response time under 200ms.
There are 3 steps you need to follow to test and improve the server response time:
Firstly, you need to collect the data and inspect why the server response time is high.
Secondly, measure your server response time to identify and fix any future performance bottlenecks.
Lastly, monitor any regression.
Many times, the reason why a website loads slow is the server itself. It’s very important to choose a high quality server from the beginning. Moving a site from a server to another might sound easy in theory, but it can be accompanied by a series of possible problems such as file size limits, wrong PHP versions and so on.
Choosing the right server can be difficult because of pricing. If you’re a multinational corporation, you probably need dedicated servers, which are expensive. If you’re just starting out with a blog, shared hosting services will probably be enough, which are usually cheap.
However, there are good shared hosting servers and bad dedicated ones and vice versa. Just don’t go after the cheapest or the most renowned. For example, Hostgator has excellent shared hosting services for the US, but not so excellent VPS ones.
2. Optimize & Reduce Image Size Without Affecting the Visual Appearance
If a website is loading really slow, one of the first things that come in mind are images. Why? Because they’re big. And we’re not talking in size on screen but in size on disk.
Besides all the information an image has, as mentioned before, it also downloads lots of bytes on a page, making the server take more time than it should to load all the information. Instead, if we optimize the page, the server will perform faster because we removed the additional bytes and irrelevant data. The fewer the downloaded bytes by the browser, the faster a browser can download and render content on the screen.
Since GIF, PNG, and JPEG are the most used types of extension for a picture, there are lots of solutions for compressing images.
Source: www.cssscript.com
Here are a few tips and recommendations to optimize your images:
Use PageSpeed Insights;
Compress images automatically in bulk with dedicated tools (tinypng.com, compressor.io, optimizilla.com) and plugins (WP Smush, CW Image Optimizer, SEO Friendly Images) and so on;
Use GIF and PNG formats because they are lossless. PNG is the desired format. The best compression ratio with a better visual quality can be achieved by PNG formats;
Convert GIF to PNG if the image is not an animation;
Remove transparency if all of the pixels are opaque for GIF and PNG;
Reduce quality to 85% for JPEG formats; that way you reduce the file size and don’t visually affect the quality;
Use progressive format for images over 10k bytes;
Prefer vector formats because they are resolution and scale independent;
Remove unnecessary image metadata (camera information and settings);
Use the option to “Save for Web” from dedicated editing programs.
Source: www.quora.com
If you’re using WordPress, you can choose a simple solution, such as the Smush Image Compression Plugin.
Update: As of 2019, Google PageSpeed Insights recommends using new format images such as JPEG2000 or WEBP. However, not all browsers and devices display these formats well yet, so regular image compression is still recommended, despite Google making efforts to push this.
You can see which images are the biggest on your website with the Site Audit by CognitiveSEO. Simply head to the Images section, under Content. There you can see a list of images over 500kb (consider that for a photographer website, these images might be relatively small in size. However, it’s a good idea to display the full HD version under a sepparate download link).
The only real issue with PageSpeed Insights is that you can only check one page at a time.
We, here at CognitiveSEO, know that many of you want to check the PageSpeed Insights in bulk. So that’s why we’ve developed our tool to be able to bulk check the Page Speed Insights scores on multiple pages at the same time:
However, note that if you have a very big website, this process might take a very long time. It’s better if you opt out of this process at first before the first analysis is done (so that you may have all the data and start fixing some of the issues) and start the PageSpeed process later. It can take up to 10 seconds per page, so if you have 60,000 pages it can take a week.
3. Minimize the Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS & Structure HTML Accordingly
When you perform a speed test with Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you will see this message: Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content in case you have some blocked resources that cause a delay in rendering your page. Besides pointing out the resources, the tool also offers some great technical SEO tips regarding:
Removing render-blocking JavaScript;
Optimizing CSS delivery.
You can remove render-blocking JavaScript by following Google’s guidelines and avoid or minimize the use of blocking JavaScript using three methods:
Inline JavaScript;
Make JavaScript Asynchronous;
Defer loading of JavaScript.
If Google detects a page which delays the time to first render because it contains blocking external stylesheets, then you should optimize CSS delivery. In this case, you have two options:
For small external CSS resources, it is recommended to inline a small CSS file and help the browser to render the page;
For large CSS files, you have to use Prioritize Visible Content to reduce the size of the above-the-fold content, inline CSS necessary for rendering it and then defer loading the remaining style.
PageSpeed shows which files need to be optimized through the minifying technique. When we talk about resources, we understand HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources. Basically, the tool will indicate a list of HTML resources, CSS resources, and JavaScript resources, depending on the situation. Below you can see an example of such kind:
For each kind of resources, you have individual options:
HTMLMinifier to minify HTML;
CSSNano and csso to minify CSS;
UglifyJS to minify JavaScript.
Below you can see an example on how to minify your CSS:
Source: www.keycdn.com
There are 3 processes that need to be followed in the minifying process, explained by Ilya Grigorik, Web performance engineer at Google:
Compress the data. After you eliminate the unnecessary resources, you need to compress the ones that the browser needs to download. The process consists in reducing the size of the data to help the website load the content faster.
Optimize the resources. Depending on what sort of information you want to provide on your site, make an inventory for your files and keep only the one that is relevant, to avoid keeping irrelevant data. After you decide which information is relevant to you, you’ll be able to see what kind of content-specific optimizations you’ll have to do.
Let’s take, for example, a photography website that needs to have pictures with a lot of information, such as camera settings, camera type, date, location, author and other information. That information is crucial for the particular website, while for another website it might be irrelevant.
Gzip compression is best used for text-based data. In the process, you are able to compress web pages and style sheets before sending them to the browser. It works wonders for CSS files and HTML because these types of resources have a lot of repeated text and white spaces. The nice part of Gzip is that it temporarily replaces the similar strings within a text file to make the overall file size smaller.
youtube
For WordPress users there are simpler solutions:
Autoptimize plugin to fix render blocking scripts and CSS. You need to install the plugin and afterward you can find it in Settings » Autoptimize to configure the settings. All you have to do is check the box for JavaScript and CSS, in our case, and click on Save Changes.
Source: www.webid-online.com
W3 Total Cache to fix render-blocking JavaScript. This is another tool provided for WordPress users and it requires a little more work. After you install it, you need to go to Performance » General Settings and look for the Minify section.
Source: www.factoriadigital.com
Check the enable box from the Minify option and then in Manual mode. In the end, click on Save all settings and add the scripts and CSS that you want to minify. After that, you’re set.
However, don’t get tricked by Google. The truth is that PageSpeed Insights is just a guideline. For example, PageSpeed Insights shows Analytics and Tag Manager as being JS that blocks the loading of important content. Yet they force you to put it in the <head> section.
You can follow this guide to better set up the W3 Total Cache Plugin.
Never remove something that is essential for tracking or for your site’s functionality just to get 100% score on PageSpeed Insights or GT Metrix.
4. Limit the Number of Resources & HTTP Requests
One of the first actions that come to mind when we talk about website speed is reducing the number of resources. When a user enters your website, a call is made to the server to access the requested files. The larger those files are, the longer it will take to respond to the requested action.
Rapid, multiple requests always slow down a server. It’s a combination of multiple factors that lead to this, but you can compare it to copying 1 large file on a hard disk against copying a very large number of small files. Usually, the small files take longer to copy because the disk needle has to keep moving. This is different with SSD technology where there are no needles but there’s still a lot more work to do to copy multiple files than to copy a single larger file.
To check your HTTP requests, you can open an Icognito (to make sure you don’t have cached requests which won’t take place) Tab in Chrome, right click and hit Inspect (at the bottom). Then you need to find the network subtab and hit F5 to refresh the page. This will start monitoring the requests and at the end you’ll see the number of requests.
There’s no general number, we can say that you should try to keep this number under 100. This really depends on the page. If it’s a HUGE page, then it can have more requests. Then again, it could be a good idea to paginate it.
The best thing you can do is delete unnecessary resources (like sliders) and then minimize the overall download size by compressing the remaining resources.
Another thing you can do is combine the CSS and JS files in a single file so that 1 single request is being made. Plugins such as Autoptimize and W3 Total Cache (both mentioned above) can do this. Through the combine option, the plugin basically takes all the CSS and JS files and merges them into a single file.
This way, the browser will only have to make one request to the server for all those files instead of one request for each file.
However, be careful! This option can usually break an entire site or make it display really messed up, so make sure you have a proper backup of the files and database before you start making any changes.
5. Set a Browser Cache Policy
The browser cache automatically saves resources in the visitor’s computer the first time they visit a new website. When users then enter the site a second time, those resources will help them get the desired information at a faster speed, if they return to that page. This way, the page load speed is improved for returning visitors.
For visitors that want to return to a page or visit a new page that in a specific moment can’t be accessed, there’s the option to view the cached version directly from SERP.
The best way to significantly improve the page speed load is to leverage the browser cache and set it according to your needs.
Most of the Minification, Compression and Combination plugins are actually cache plugins, so they all have this function. You can use W3 Total Cache or any other caching plugin suits you best. However, a combination between W3 Total Cache’s caching and Autoptimize’s compression and combining is best.
Using a cache will also make changes harder to spot. If you make a change to your website, open an Icognito tab to see the changes and go to the plugin settings from time to time to reset the cache.
6. Reduce the Number of Redirects & Eliminate Redirect Loop
Redirects can save you from a lot of trouble regarding link equity/juice and broken pages, but it can also cause you lots of problems if you have tons of them. A large number of redirects will load your websites at a slower speed. The more redirects, the more time a user must spend to get on the landing page.
Plain and simple, WordPress redirects slow down your site. That’s why it’s worth taking the time to minimize the number of redirects visitors to your site experience. There are times that it’s appropriate to intentionally create and use redirection, but limit the use of redirection to necessary instances and make sure your visitors have the fastest experience possible when browsing your WordPress website. Jon Penland Support Engineer at Kinsta / @jonrichpen
One other thing worth mentioning is that you need to have only one redirect for a page, otherwise you risk having a redirect loop. A redirect loop is a chain of redirects for the same page, which is misleading because the browser won’t know which page to show and will end up giving a pretty nasty error.
Source: www.matrudev.com
In case you have 404 pages, there are lots of ways to customize the page and give some guidelines to the users so you won’t lose them. Design a friendly page and send the user back to your homepage or to another relevant and related piece of content.
For finding the broken pages for your website, you can use the Google Search Console by looking at Crawl » Crawl Errors, then click on Not found (if any).
Site Explorer offers a similar feature, pointing out the link juice you are losing (the number of referring domains and links for each broken page).
You can also use the new Technical SEO Site Audit Tool to analyze all your site’s redirects. After you set up the campaign and the tool finishes crawling and analyzing your site, simply head to Architecture > Redirects.
7. Avoid Loading Your Site With Too Much Stuff
Over time, sites tend to get clogged up with useless images, plugins and functions that are never used. Why?
If you use WordPress, for example, you might test a lot of plugins and install them on your website, only to find out that you don’t really need them. Sure, you can disable them and eventually uninstall them but the problem with WordPress uninstalls is that they’re often dirty, leaving traces in your Database which can make it a little slower.
Try not to get your site looking like this, it’s probably not the best UX.
Another very common type of plugin that webmasters use are Sliders. Sliders used to be popular but recent testing has shown over and over again that they kill conversions.
Not only that, but Sliders also usually load your site with a lot of things you don’t need. The first one is usually the Javascript file which tends to load on all pages (either in the footer or the head section of your HTML). However, the slider is most probably used only on the homepage.
Also, if you have 6 slides on your homepage, with 6 big pretty images, your site can be 2 or 3 times slower because of the size in bytes of the images. Unfortunately, nobody is probably going to look past the second image, if it auto-slides, of course.
A good workaround is having some sort of development environment where you can test 5-10 plugins until you find exactly what you need. Then, make a plan of implementation so that you know only the essentials you need to install on the live version.
After that, you can reset the development version by deleting it and copying the updated live version to it. This way, the live version will not be clogged either and will resemble the live version more.
II. Website Functionality & Usability
After you make sure your website can load fast for your users, it’s time to see what you can do to improve your visibility in the search engines. There are very many aspects that go into this, but the following ones are a mixture between the most important ones and the most common mistakes that webmasters make.
8. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile Friendly
There’s nothing much to say here. Since more than 50% of all the users worldwide are using their mobile devices to browse the internet, Google has prioritized mobile indexation. You should make sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices.
This is usually meant in terms of design, but also in terms of speed and functionality. Generally, it’s preferred to have a responsive design rather than a fully separate mobile version, as the m.site.com subdomain requires extra steps to be implemented correctly using rel=alternate tag.
You can ensure that your site is mobile friendly by testing it on Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Page.
9. Build Search Engine Friendly URLs
URLs are very important because it’s good not to change them. This means you have to get them right the first time. It’s useful for users and search engines to have URLs that are descriptive and contain keywords.
However, many people often forget this and build websites with dynamic URLs that aren’t optimized at all. It’s not that Google doesn’t accept them. They can rank but, eventually, you’ll get to the point where you’ll have to merge to new ones to improve performance, UX and search engine visibility and it’s going to be a struggle.
Changing page URLs very often results in issues with search engines. It’s always better if you get them good the first time.
We’ve talked on this topic various times before because it is important to have easy-to-follow URLs. Avoid having query parameters in URL. You can’t keep track of that URL in Analytics, Search Console and so on. Not to mention it is difficult to do link building. You might lose linking opportunities because of your URLs appearance.
Source blogspot.com
If you’re a WordPress user, you have the option to personalize and set up your permalink structure. If you take a look at the next picture, you can see the options you have for your URL structure.
Building friendly URLs is not so hard, you can follow the next 3 tips:
use dashes (-) instead or underscores (_);
make it shorter;
use the keyword (focus keyword).
Building easy-to-read and focus-keyword-URLs you are thinking about your users and therefore focusing on user experience. David Farkas has the same vision on the matter:
If you focus on user experience, you’ll be building sustainable links – and building trust with users. To build a truly great link, you have to look at every aspect of the link from the user’s perspective. David Farkas Founder & CEO TheUpperRanks
You can always check your ‘unfriendly’ URLs using the CognitiveSEO Site Audit. After you set up your campaign, you just have to go to Architecture > URLs.
Then you’ll be able to see a list of your URLs that don’t contain any keywords. You can also identify other issues using this feature. For example, in the following screenshot, although the URLs are blurred in order to protect the client’s identity, we’ve identified a hreflang problem. The titles and content for some secondary languages were generated in the main language when proper content in the secondary language was not provided.
This means that the URLs were actually OK, just not descriptive due to the content being generated in the wrong language.
10. Use the Secure Protocol – HTTPS
On August 6, 2014, Google announced that HTTPS protocol is on their new ranking factors list and recommended to all the sites to move from HTTP to HTTPS.
HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) encryptes the data and doesn’t allow it to be modified or corrupted during transfer, while protecting it against man-in-the-middle attacks. Besides, the improvement in data security has other benefits, such as:
It helps your website have a boost in rankings, since it is a ranking factor.
It offers referrer details included under “Direct” traffic source in Google Analytics.
It assures the users that the website is safe to use and that the data provided is encrypted for avoiding hacking or data leaks.
If you use the HTTPS, will see a lock before the URL in the navigation bar:
In case your website doesn’t use the HTTPS protocol, you’ll see an information icon and if you click on it, a new message will alert you that the connection is not safe, therefore the website is not secure.
While it is best to move from HTTP to HTTPS, it is crucial to find the best way to recover all your data after moving your website. For instance, lots of users complained they lost all of their shares after moving the website and the same thing happened to us.
After we experienced the same issue, we’ve created a guideline on how to recover Facebook (and Google+) shares after an https migration that you could easily follow:
Find out how many Facebook shares you have at a URL;
Set both your HTTP and HTTPs social shares to zero;
Update rel=”canonical”;
Identify Facebook’s Crawler.
Again, this issue is related to URLs so, every time you need to do mass redirects, issues can occur. It’s always a good idea to have your URLs well set up from the beginning. However, if you really need to migrate the site from HTTP to HTTPS, you can check out this HTTP to HTTPS migration guide.
11. Set Your Preferred Version
You also want to make sure that all your other versions are pointing to the correct, preferred version of your site. If people access one version they should automatically be redirected to the correct version.
These are all the versions:
http://site.com
https://site.com
http://www.site.com
https://www.site.com
So, if your preferred version is https://www.site.com, all other versions should 301 directly to that version. You can also test if this is alright in the SEO Audit Tool. Simply head to Indexability > Preferred Domain. Look for the Everything is OK message. If you can’t find it, then guess what: not everything is OK.
12. Set up Correctly the 301 Redirects After Site Migration
Site migration is a recommended operation in case the website is changed completely and the same domain won’t be used anymore. Setting up the 301 redirects can be applied in case you make a switchover from HTTP to HTTPS and want to preserve the link equity.
In case of a site migration, it is crucial to set up correctly the redirects. To avoid losing lots of links and have broken pages on your site, it is best to follow a correct 301 redirection procedure. For that, you need to take into consideration the next recommendations. For the vast majority, we’ve already covered some of them in the previous steps:
Set up the 301 redirect code from the old URLs to the new URLs;
Avoid redirection loops;
Remove invalid characters in URLs;
Verify the preferred version of your new domain (www vs. non-www);
Submit a change of address in Search Console;
Submit the new sitemap in Google;
Check for broken links and resources.
13. Make Sure Your Resources Are Crawlable
Having non-crawlable resources is a critical search engine optimization technical issue. Crawling is the first step, right before indexing, which comes and puts your content in the user’s hands/eyes. Basically, Googlebot crawls the data and then sends it to the indexer which renders the page and after that, if you’re lucky, you’ll see that page ranking in SERP.
www.slideshare.net/ryanspoon
It is very important that the users see the same content that the Googlebot does.
If your CSS files are closed from indexing, Google won’t be able to see the pages like a users does. The same situation applies to Javascript, if it isn’t crawlable. With JavaScript, it is a little bit more complicated, especially if your site is heavily built using AJAX. It is necessary to write codes for the server to send an accurate version of the site to Google.
If you’re not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript or CSS files, Google will be able to render and understand your web pages like modern browsers.
Google recommends using Fetch as Google to let Googlebot crawl your JavaScript.
Source www.webnots.com
Update: As of 2019, the Google Search Console has launched a new version which doesn’t have many of the features the old version had. Luckily, you can still access the old version if you need those features. However, they are likely to be completely removed at some point, who knows.
14. Test Your Robots.Txt File to Show Google the Right Content
Crawlability issues are usually related to the robots.txt file. Testing your robots.txt file helps Googlebot by telling it which pages to crawl and which not to crawl. By using this method, you give access to your data to Google.
You can view your robots.txt file online if you search for http://domainname. com/robots.txt. Make sure the order of your files is right. It should look similar to what you can see in the following picture:
Use the robots.txt Tester tool from Search Console to write or edit robots.txt files for your site. The tool is easy to use and shows you whether your robots.txt file blocks Google web crawlers from specific URLs. The ideal situation would be to have no errors:
The errors appear when Google is unable to crawl the specific URL due to a robots.txt restriction. There are multiple reasons for that and Google names just some of them:
For instance, your robots.txt file might prohibit the Googlebot entirely; it might prohibit access to the directory in which this URL is located; or it might prohibit access to the URL specifically. Google
The common issues that appear when Googlebot is blocked to access your website happen because:
There are DNS issues and Google can’t communicate with DNS server;
The firewall or DoS protection system is misconfigured ;
The Googlebot is intentionally blocked from reaching the website.
After you’ve checked the issues and found out which are the blocked resources pointed in the Tester tool, you can test again and see if your website is ok.
The site’s crawlability can be verified better on a larger scale using the CognitiveSEO Audit Tool. You simply have to go to Indexability > Indexable Pages and look for the Disallowed in Robots.txt links. Click on the red line and it will show you a list of URLs that have been disallowed.
15. Verify the Indexed Content
James Parsons, expert in content marketing and SEO, explains in an article on AudienceBloom the crucial significance of the indexing phase for a website.
Indexed pages are those that are scoured by Google search engines for possible new content or for information it already knows about. Having a web page indexed is a critical part of a website’s Internet search engine ranking and web page content value. James Parsons Blogger at JamesParsons.com
Search Console can provide lots of insightful information regarding the status of your indexed pages. The steps are simple, go to Google Index then to Index Status and you’ll be able to see a similar chart to the one shown below:
The ideal situation would be that the number of indexed pages is the same as the total number of the pages within your website, except the ones you don’t want to be indexed. Verify if you’ve set up proper noindex tags. In case there is a big difference, review them and check for blocked resources. If that concluded with an OK message, then check if some of the pages weren’t crawled, therefore indexed.
In case you didn’t see something that was out of the ordinary, test your robots.txt file and check your sitemap. For that check the following steps (9 and 10).
You can also use the Site Audit tool to view the URLs that have been marked up with No-Index tag. They’re in the same section as the URLs blocked by Robots.txt (Indexability > Indexable Pages).
16. Review Your Sitemap to Avoid Being Outdated
An XML Sitemap explains to Google how your website is organized. An example you can see in the picture below:
Source: statcounter.com
Crawlers will read and understand how a website is structured in a more intelligible way. A good structure means better crawling. Use dynamic XML sitemaps for bigger sites. Don’t try to manually keep all in sync between robots.txt, meta robots, and the XML sitemaps.
Search Console comes to rescue once again. In the Crawl section, you can find the Sitemap report, where you can add, manage and test your sitemap file.
Up to this point, you have two options: test a new sitemap or test a previously added one. In the first case:
Add the Sitemap;
Enter the URL of the sitemap;
Click on Test sitemap and then refresh the page if needed;
When the test is completed, click Open Test Results to check for errors. Fix your errors;
After you fix your errors, click Submit Sitemap.
In the second case, you can test an already submitted sitemap; click on Test and check the results.
There are three things you need to do in the situation explained in the second situation.
Update the Sitemap when new content is added to your site or once in a while;
Clean it from time to time, eliminating outdated and bad content;
Keep it shorter so that your important pages get crawled more frequently or break the sitemap into smaller parts. A sitemap file can’t contain more than 50,000 URLs and must not be larger than 50 MB uncompressed.
Using a sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all the items in your sitemap will be crawled and indexed, as Google processes rely on complex algorithms to schedule crawling. However, in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap, and you’ll never be penalized for having one. Google
17. Review Blocked Resources (Hashbang URLs) with Fetch as Google
Hashbang URLs (URLs that have the #! in them) can be checked and tested in Fetch as Google now. John Mueller acknowledged that Google has the ability to fetch & render hashbang URL’s via the Search Console.
Google stopped supporting them on March 30, 2014, and that changed when it announced on October 14, 2015 that it deprecates their AJAX crawling system. At the moment hashbang URLs can be tested.
Below you can see two situations for the same website. In the first picture, you can see the list of resources before using the fetch and render feature with the hashbang URL and in the second one you can see the situation after the fetch and render action was performed.
Source: www.tldrseo.com
18. Optimize Your Crawl Budget
The term “crawl budget” started to collect more value when Gary Illyes explained on January 16, 2017 how Google uses it.
Crawl budget means how many resources are allocated for crawling by a server or how many pages are crawled by the search engines in a specific period of time. Google says that there is nothing to worry if the pages tend to be crawled every day. The issues appear on bigger sites. It is very important to optimize your crawl budget.
Maria Cieślak, search engine optimization expert, explains in an article on DeepCrawl the importance of optimizing your crawl budget.
Google is crawling only a particular number of pages on your website, and may sort the URLs incorrectly (I mean differently than you wish). For example, the “About us” page (that doesn’t drive sales) can gain more hits than the category listings with the new products. Your aim is to present to Google the most relevant and fresh content. Maria Cieślak SEO Specialist at Elephate
The crawl limit rate comes into discussion, which limits the maximum fetching rate for a given site.
The actions recommended for optimizing the crawl budget are:
Check the soft 404s and fix them using a personalized message and a custom page;
Get rid of duplicate content to avoid wasting crawl budget;
Remove hacked pages;
Prevent indexation for low quality and spam content;
Keep your sitemap up to date;
Correct infinite space issues;
19. Avoid Meta Refresh for Moving a Site
Since we’ve talked about the redirection plan for migrating a site, it is best to understand why Google doesn’t recommend using meta refresh for moving a website. There are three ways to define redirects:
HTTP responses with a status code of 3xx;
HTML redirections using the <meta> element;
JavaScript redirections using the DOM.
Aseem Kishore, owner of Help Desk Geek.com, explains why it is better not to use this meta refresh technique:
Although not particularly dangerous, Meta Refreshes are often used by unscrupulous webpage programmers to draw you into a web page using one piece of content and then redirect you to another page with some other content. Referred to as a black hat technique, most of the major search engines are smart enough not to fall for this method of “cloaking” web content. Aseem Kishore Owner and Editor-in-Chief at Help Desk Geek.com
When possible, always try to use HTTP redirects, and don’t use a <meta> element. HTTP redirection is the preferred option, but sometimes the web developer doesn’t have control of the server or can’t control it. And they must use other methods. Although HTML redirection is one of them, Google strongly discourages web developers to use it.
If a developer uses the HTTP redirects and forgets the HTML redirects, they aren’t identical anymore and might end up in an infinite loop, which leads to other problems.
In case you want to move a site, Google guidelines recommend to follow the next steps:
Read and understand the basic knowledge of moving a website;
Prepare the new site and test it thoroughly;
Prepare a URL mapping from the current URLs;
Correctly configure the server to make the redirects to move the site;
Monitor the traffic for old and URLs.
20. Use Redirect for Flash Site to the HTML Version
Creating a flash site without a redirect to the HTML version is a big SEO mistake. Flash content might have an appealing look, but just like JavaScript and AJAX, it is difficult to render. The crawler needs all the help it can get to crawl the data and send it to the indexer. The Flash site must have a redirect to the HTML version.
If you have a pretty site, what’s the point if Google can’t read it and show it the same way you’d want it to? Flash websites might tell a beautiful story, but it’s all for nothing if Google can’t render it. HTML is the answer! Build an HTML version with SWFObject 2.0. This tool helps you optimize flash content.
21. Use Hreflang for Multi-Language Websites
Hreflang tags are used for language and regional URLs. It is recommended to use the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results in the next situations:
You keep the main content in a single language and use translate the template (navigation and footer). Best used for user-generated content.
You have small regional variations with similar content in a single language. For a website that uses the English language targeted to the US, GB, and Ireland.
You have a site content that is fully translated. For websites where you have multiple language versions of each page.
Maile Ohye, former Developer Programs Tech Lead, explains how site owners can expand to new languages variations and keep the search engines friendly:
youtube
Based on these options, you can apply multiple hreflang tags to a single URL. Make sure, though, the provided hreflang is valid:
It doesn’t have missing confirmation links: If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A.
It doesn’t have incorrect language codes: The language codes must use them in ISO 639-1 format and optionally the region must be in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format.
We’ve documented a complete guideline on the vital hreflang & multi-language website mistakes that most webmasters make, that we recommend you to follow.
Also, you can use the Site Audit to quickly analyze and identify hreflang issues on your website. Simply head to Content > Hreflang/Languages to get a list of your implementation issues. In the following screenshot you can see that this site has a lot of missing confirmation links, which means that Language A Page points to the Language B Page but Language B Page doesn’t point back to Language A Page.
22. Make Sure Your Tracking Is Working Properly
Tracking your website is really important. Without tracking your results, you won’t be able to see any improvements.
Tracking issues are common after migrations from HTTP to HTTPS or after minifying and combining JS files. They can break the tracking code resulting in a loss of data.
You need to make sure that everything is working properly so that you can track the results of the improvements you’re making over time.
III. Content Optimization
Now that you’ve fixed the general issues that can create crawlability and indexability issues, you can focus more on specific issues regarding your content, such as broken pages, internal linking and so on.
This is very important if you really want to surpass your competition, especially in highly competitive markets.
23. Redirect/Replace Broken Links & Resources
Sometimes the images from a webpage aren’t available, so a broken image is displayed in the client’s browser. It can happen to everybody. There are lots of reasons for that. And it is not a pretty situation. You know the saying: A picture is worth a thousand words and a missing picture with an ugly icon with a message will say something as well…
A solution would be to add an error handler on the IMG tag:
<img src="http://www.example.com/broken_url.jpg"onerror="this.src='path_to_default_image'" />
Some webmasters say that Chrome and Firefox recognize when images aren’t loaded and log it to the console, while others have other opinions.
Sam Deering, web developer specialized in JavaScript & jQuery, offers some great steps to resolve these issues:
Firstly, search for some information on the current images on page;
Secondly, use AJAX to test if the image exists;
Then refresh image;
Fix broken images using AJAX;
Check the Non-AJAX function version.
In most browsers, the ALT tag is shown if the image is not found. This could be a problem if the image is small and the ALT tag is long as it seems the output width of the element is not forced by the length of the alt tag. Sam Deering Front-end Web Developer
This is also the case with broken URLs. Although nothing weird will be displayed on the site, if the user clicks on a broken link, it will lead to a bad experience. You can view which resources are broken on your website by heading to the Architecture section in the Site Audit tool.
24. Audit Internal Links to Improve Your Chances to Rank Higher
Internal links are the connection between your pages and, due to them, you can build a strong website architecture by spreading link juice, or link equity, as others refer to it.
Creating connections between similar pieces of content creates the terminology of Silo content. This method presumes to create groups of topics and content based on keywords and it defines a hierarchy.
Source: www.seoclarity.net
There are a lot of advantages for building internal links because it:
opens the road to search engines spiders by making it accessible;
transfers link juice;
improves user navigation and offers extra information to the user;
organizes the pages based on the keyword used as an anchor text;
highlights the most important pages and transfers this information to the search engines;
organizes site architecture.
The more relevant pages are combined with each other when crawled repeatedly, and as the crawling frequency rises, so does the overall rank in search engines.
Kasia Perzyńska Content Marketer Unamo
When you audit internal links, there are four things that need to be checked:
Broken links;
Redirected links;
Click depth;
Orphan pages;
You can easily do all of those using the CognitiveSEO Site Audit Tool under Architecture > Linking Structure.
25. Get Rid of Duplicate Content
When we talk about technical SEO, we also think of duplicate content, which is a serious problem. Be prepared and review your HTML Improvements from Search Console to remove the duplicates.
Keep unique and relevant title tags, descriptions within your website by looking into the Search Console at Search Appearance » HTML Improvements.
In Search Console, you can find a list of all the duplicate content leading you to the pages that need improvement. Remove or review each element and craft other titles and meta descriptions. Google loves fresh and unique content. Panda algorithm confirms it.
Another option would be to apply the canonical tag to pages with duplicate content. The tag will show to the search engines which is the original source with your rel=canonical tag. Canonicalizing irrelevant URLs to avoid content duplication is a recommended practice.
Jayson DeMers, Founder & CEO of AudienceBloom, considers that duplicate content can affect your website and discourage search engines to rank your website and it can also lead to bad user experience, as he says on Forbes.
Just a few instances of duplicate content can trigger Google to rank your site lower in search results, leaving you unable to recover until those content duplication issues are addressed. Duplicate content can also interfere with your user experience, leaving your site visitors feeling that your site is more fluff than substance. Jayson DeMers Founder & CEO of AudienceBloom
The CognitiveSEO Site Audit Tool can not only easily identify Duplicate Content, but it also has a feature to identify near duplicate content, which are pages that are very similar in content but not quite the same.
Fixing duplicate content issues is critical, especially for eCommerce websites where this practice/issue is common. The tool makes it very easy to fix.
26. Use Structured Data to Highlight Your Content
Structured data is the way to make Google understand your content and help the user choose and get directly on the page they are interested in through rich search results. If a website uses structured markup data, Google might display it in SERP as you can see in the following picture:
Beside rich snippets, structured data can be used for:
Getting featured in the Knowledge graph;
Gaining beta releases and having advantages in AMP, Google News, etc.;
Helping Google offer results from your website based on contextual understanding;
Source: www.link-assistant.com
The language for structured data is schema.org. You can highlight your content using structured data. Schema.org helps webmasters mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines.
If you want to get in rich search results your site’s page must use one of three supported formats:
JSON-LD (recommended);
Microdata;
RDFa.
After you highlight your content using structured data, it is recommended to test it using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. Testing it will give you great directions to see if you set it right or if you didn’t comply with Google’s guidelines because you can get penalized for spammy structured markup.
Google doesn’t guarantee the appearance of each content highlighted using structured data markup.
27. Keep a Reasonable Number of Links On-Page
People from the web community often associate pages with 100 links or more with “link farms”. Also, UX has a significant impact on the number of links on a single page. A piece of content abundant of links will distract the users and fail to offer them any piece of information because most of it is linked. You need to add links only where you think it is relevant and it can offer extra information or you need to specify the source.
Patrick Sexton, Googlebot Whisperer, explains in an article on Varvy why it is important to keep a reasonable amount of links per page:
You may also wish to consider how well your webpage is linked to. If a webpage has many quality links pointing to it, that webpage can have many links (even more than 100) but it is important to remember the reasons why you shouldn’t have a huge amount of links on any given page. Patrick Sexton Googlebot Whisperer at Outspoken Media
In general, the more links on the page, the higher the need to keep that page more organized in order for the user to get the information they came for on that page. Also, be careful to search for natural ways to add links and don’t violate Google’s guidelines for building links. The same recommendation applies for internal links.
28. Avoid Canonicalizing Blog Pages to the Root of the Blog
John Mueller said in one Google Webmaster Hangout that Google’s doesn’t encourage canonicalizing blog subpages to the root of the blog as a preferred version. Subpages aren’t a true copy of the blog’s main page so doing that has no logic.
You can listen to the whole conversion from minute 16:28:
youtube
Even if Google sees the canonical tag, it will ignore it because it thinks it’s a webmaster’s mistake.
Setting up blog subpages with a canonical blog pointed to the blog’s main page isn’t a correct set up because those pages are not an equivalent, from Google’s point of view. John Mueller Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google
Canonical links are often misunderstood and incorrectly implemented, so make sure you check all your URLs for bad canonical implementation. You can do this easily with the Technical SEO Audit tool by CognitiveSEO.
Remember that it’s a good idea to always have a self-referencing canonical tag pointing to your page. This will ensure there are less duplicate content issues.
IV. User-Friendlier Website
Google cares about UX, so why wouldn’t you? Many experts think that UX is crucial in the future of SEO, especially with all the evolution of machine learning technology. David Freeman, Search Engine Land Columnist, has a strong opinion on the role of UX:
Part of Google’s philosophy has always been focused on delivering the best user experience. With recent technological advances, Google and other search engines are now better placed than ever to deliver this vision. David Freeman Group Head of SEO at Treatwell & Search Engine Land Columnist
29. Set up Your AMP the Right Way – Mobile Friendlier
Google recommends using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to improve the UX, highly valued by the company. Since the Google AMP change will affect a lot of sites, it is best to understand the way it works and the right way to set it up/install it on different platforms: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Concrete5, OpenCart or generate custom AMP Implementation.
On this topic, we created a guideline on how to implement AMP because it is a process which needs full understanding. Google AMP doesn’t directly affect SEO, but indirect factors that result from AMP can.
Historically, Google has acted as an index that points people away from Google to other websites. With its AMP search results, Google is amassing content on its own servers and keeping readers on Google. Klint Finley Content writer at Wired Business / @klintron
AMP is pretty difficult to implement correctly. You can always run into issues. Miss one tag closing bracket and you risk your AMP version not displaying at all. You can test the format of all your site’s AMP pages quickly using the CognitiveSEO Tool.
In the following example there are no AMP pages set up, but if you have any, you may want to take a look at the Incorrectly set up AMP Pages section to identify the problematic ones:
30. Add Breadcrumbs for a Better Navigation
Breadcrumbs, used by Hansel and Gretel to find their way back home, are implemented by websites with the same purpose, to lead the user through the website. They help the visitors understand where are they located on the website and give directions for an easier accessibility.
Source: www.smashingmagazine.com
Breadcrumbs can improve the user-experience and help search engines have a clear picture of the site structure. Fulfilling the need to a second navigation on the website, breadcrumbs shouldn’t replace the primary navigation though.
Another advantage of them is that they reduce the number of actions and clicks a user must take on a page. Instead of going back and forth, they can easily use the link level/category to go where they want. A technique can be applied to big websites or e-commerce sites.
W3Schools exemplifies how to add breadcrumbs in two steps.
Add HTML
<ul class="breadcrumb"> <li><a href="#">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#">Pictures</a></li> <li><a href="#">Summer 15</a></li> <li>Italy</li> </ul>
Add CSS
/* Style the list */ ul.breadcrumb { padding: 10px 16px; list-style: none; background-color: #eee; } /* Display list items side by side */ ul.breadcrumb li { display: inline; font-size: 18px; } /* Add a slash symbol (/) before/behind each list item */ ul.breadcrumb li+li:before { padding: 8px; color: black; content: "/\00a0"; } /* Add a color to all links inside the list */ ul.breadcrumb li a { color: #0275d8; text-decoration: none; } /* Add a color on mouse-over */ ul.breadcrumb li a:hover { color: #01447e; text-decoration: underline; }
If you want a simpler solution, you can use plugins for WordPress, such as Breadcrumb NavXT Plugin or Yoast SEO.
Go to SEO in Dashboard, then click on Advanced and select Enable Breadcrumbs » Save changes. This method will apply the default setting for your breadcrumbs.
31. Test On as Many Platforms and Devices as Possible
People use different devices. If you want your users to have a good experience, you need to test on multiple devices. As many as you can!
You can start with Chrome by right clicking and hitting Inspect. Then you can toggle the device toolbar and select the type of device you want to view your site on.
You can also use 3rd party tools, such as ScreenFly.
However, keep in mind that these tools only take the screen width into consideration. For example, if you don’t own an iOS device, you’ll never know that WEBM format videos don’t play on Safari Browser.
You really need to test on different devices and browsers. Test on Windows, iOS, Linux, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Chrome, Opera and even the sad, old and forgotten Internet Explorer.
If you don’t own an Android or an iPhone/iPad, go to a store if needed or find a friend. Whenever you can get your hands on a new device, take a minute or two to browse your website.
Conclusion
Firstly, this SEO guide offers solutions and points out directions on how to make a website fast and decrease the loading time by following the recommendations on Google Speed Insights and Google developers’ guidelines.
Secondly, we went through the functional elements of a website, by trying to check and resolve issues related to crawling errors, indexing status, using redirects and making a website accessible to Google.
Thirdly, we looked for improving and optimizing the content by resolving critical technical SEO issues. We discussed how to remove duplicate content, replace missing information and images, make a strong architecture website, highlighting our content and making it visible to Google.
Lastly, we pointed out two issues regarding the mobile-friendliness sites and navigational websites.
The post Technical SEO Checklist – The Roadmap to a Complete Technical SEO Audit appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
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