"From the Website Strategies blog Technical Aspects of SEO
When it comes to SEO optimisation , there are several important technical tasks that must be completed in order for a website to be successful in Google’s search results. Without the completion of these technical tasks any other work that has been done may be a wasted effort.
Technical optimisation removes barriers to effective indexing by the search engines. When you have done everything you can to allow the search engines to crawl and database your website, then you have succeeded in creating a “search engine friendly” website. There are several technical items that should be completed by you, but first you will need to check to see if your site has been fully indexed by Google. Type this search into Google: site:www.yourdomain.com – the yourdomain.com part should be replaced with your web address, then see what results are returned.
You should see a list of every page from your website that has been indexed in Google’s databases. Check to see that all of the pages from your website have been indexed, because if some are missing there may be an issue with those pages in that they have not been found by Google or they have been excluded for some reason.
How is the quality for the results that show up in your search? You should see a variety of titles for each page indexed and snippets which are a small amount of text from each page under the page title for every listing that is returned in a search result. If all of the titles and snippets are similar you want to change them to be unique and different from one another. If you see duplication then you should work on making each page and the content or description of the page unique.
You can run a search for duplicate content by doing a “show omitted” result at the bottom of the page. If you get a different result from what you first viewed and the results that come up with omitted results, then this is an indication that your website contains duplicate content. If some pages are too similar to one another on your site they will be omitted in search results. It is a good idea to do your best to work on these pages and make them more unique. Google hates duplicate content and will not index many pages from your website if they are all similar – make them different.
Is there an XML sitemap for your website?
Your site map should be listed at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. If there is no sitemap, you can create one and add it to your root directory. If you have a wordpress site, you can use a plugin to get the job done easily. If you need a tool, there is a good one located here:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Your sitemap is basically an index of all of the pages that are contained on your site and is used to let Google know which pages on your site should be indexed. You should be using Google Webmaster Tools or something similar to keep track of your site, and the sitemap is utilised by these services to report any issues or errors that are coming up on your site.
Are the URLs on your pages optimised and SEO friendly?
Your page URLs should contain keyword phrases that relate to the content on your page. If you have a page with content relating to botox injections your page should read www.mydomain.com/botoxinjections. Keywords contained in the URL happen to be significant in Google’s world, so you should consider changing them if they do not contain those important keywords. If necessary, you can use a 301 redirect to have your old URLs point to your new ones.
If your URLs contain some parameters (example “?”) you should try to remove these if it is possible. They are not a really big deal as they once were, but if you use a web developer they can take care of this for you if it is possible.
Does your site have a robots.txt file?
Type the following into your browser:
www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt
The robots.txt file contains important basic instructions for the search engines about what should or should not be indexed for your website. If there is no file then you should create one and add it to your site. If you use a web developer they will be able to take care of this for you.
Has someone stolen content from your site?
Choose a few key pages and check them here: www.copyscape.com
If someone is stealing your content you may see it indexed in Google and it could be ranked higher than your original content.
Try an Images Search
When you search your site to see if it is indexed by typing in site:www.yourdomain.com , you can also see what types of images are showing up in the SERPS. Look under the images selection, right after the “web” tab. You do want your images to show up in this search, so if they are not showing up try to optimise them by adding a unique file name, alt tag, title and caption. Your website logo should definitely be one of the things that is listed under an images search.
Do the same search for video results
If you have videos on your website they should show up under the videos tab.
Do you have canonical duplication for your site?
Some common areas of duplication in a large number of websites include:
having both the www and non www versions of your website live. If you can correct this, then do so because you have automatically created a duplicate content issue with two versions of your page being live. This is not something that will ruin your SERPs but you should tidy it up if possible. Your web developer can easily redirect the non-www version to your www page through a 301 redirect.
If you have a file extension for your home page it can be seen if you click the “home” button from any internal page on your site. The result will be the true address of your home page as seen in the URL bar. Your web developer can easily redirect the full URL back to your main domain name by using a 301 redirect. This will help to maintain one unique URL for your website.
Does your website menu contain images or text?
Navigation that is text based is a lot more friendly from an SEO perspective because it is easier for Google to crawl your website. If you need to you can create a copy of your navigation with text in the footer of your website. This is not something that is commonly seen in the SEO of 2014 , because most web developers are using navigation that is text based.
If you take care of these minor technical factors it can help you to fine tune your site and assist with your rankings rather than preventing it from being held back. These issues may not be a big deal now, but as your site’s Google rankings increase it is more likely to be scrutinised by Google through automated bots, the algorithm of Google or by real people.
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