10 SEO health checks for your wordpress website
Let's cover the basics first
- Reliable Hosting Service
- HTTPS Enabled
- Good site security
4. Robots.txt
Location:
Root Directory of the website.
Purpose:
In simple words it tells robots/crawlers from different search engines, which files are to be crawled and which files are to be left alone.
To see samples of Robots.txt file, go to the websites that you find reliable and knowledgeable and type robots.txt after the root domain.
5. Website Hierarchy
Home
About
Blog
Tools
- www.mywbesite.com/tools/trello
- www.mywebsite.com/tools/buffer
6. SITEMAP
xml sitemap makes your website easy to navigate and content categorization easy to understand for search engines.
Use WordPress plugin Yoast or All in One SEO plugin to generate a sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.
7. Google SEARCH CONSOLE
get actionable feedback with gSC
get actionable feedback with gSC
get actionable feedback with gSC
get actionable feedback with gSC
8. BACKlink audit
- check how many backlinks you have
- check if the links are broken
- to check broken links use a broken link checker WP plugin or run a scan using the Screaming Frog tool
- check the domain authority of the backlinks
- to do this you can do a backlink audit using SEMRush or Ahrefs
- Or Go to Google Search Console and export the backlinks and copy-paste links in https://websiteseochecker.com/domain-authority-checker/
8. BACKlink audit
Go to Google Search Console, export the backlinks and copy-paste links in https://websiteseochecker.com/domain-authority-checker/
9. Fix Broken Links
- Use a WordPress Broken Link checker plugin
- Use Screaming Frog to crawl your website and find out inbound and outbound broken links
- Other freemium and premium tools to run audits are SEMrush and Ahrefs.
10. Cover the basics on PAge
- Meta Description
- Title tags
- 50-60 characters
- Link to Title tag tester
- Or use Yoast
- Proper H1 tags
- only 1 H1 per page
- between 20 and 70 Characters
- Proper H2 tags
- Featured image
- Proper Open Graph Cards
How to create meaningful meta, title, h1, h2 etc. Describe what the page is about, use keywords, don't use uncommon abbreviations, use short sentences that make sense.
Yoast SEO(Free version) plugin can help you cover these basics on all pages.
Another tool to test on page SEO https://www.seoptimer.com/
11. Orphan Pages
Use screaming frog to find Orphan pages, if they are useful keep them, if they are not as useful get rid of them or put a reminder to remove them.
12. Duplicate Content
Use Siteliner.com to find duplicate content.
Use canonicals or no-index or corner stone content to guide search engines, so that internal site clutter doesn't confuse Search Engines, when they crawl your site.
13. Schema Markup
https://schema.org/ is the database of all kinds of Schema Mark up.
Schema markup makes it easy for SE's to understand what type of content is on the page. For example Events, Real Estate. It's like English or Hindi, but for Search Engines.
Yoast paid version has a dropdown menu on each page to define what type of page it is.
14. Accessibility
Test accessibility score using dev tools on Chrome
Go to your page -> Right Click -> Inspect -> Lighthouse -> Select Accessibility -> Analyze
Guidelines for Accessibility
15. Speed Optimization
- Google Search Console -> Core Web Vitals
- Google Analytics - > Behaviour, Site -> Speed
Find out which pages are doing bad and analyze each page with lighthouse to find and fix issues.
Learn more about page speed optimization here https://web.dev/measure/
16. Check the site health Tab in WordPRess
17. www or non-www and slash or no slash
Last but not least, make sure your www urls redirect to non-www or vice versa, urls with no slash end with a slash.
A detailed article with all technicalities.
18. Optimize images for SEO
-
Make sure all the images are named properly, using the following naming convention
- 4-5 words max, lower case, words separated by dashes not underscore
-
Make sure all images are named in the context they are used on the page.
- For example, if we are talking about food trucks on a page, make sure all the images are cohesive with the topic of food truck
- Make sure all images have a proper ALT and Title tag
Questions and Answers
Thank you
kpatelneha23
kpatelneha23@gmail.com