For as long as there have been search engines there has been search engine optimization.
The idea of “free” search traffic has an innate appeal to everybody with a website. Many of these people have sought to get a piece of that traffic in one way or another.
You used to be able to build a bunch of links to a web page using the keyword as the anchor text and rank. This came to an end in the spring of 2012 with Google’s first Penguin update.
Penguin targeted spammy anchor text specifically, and continues to evolve to better identify and penalize manipulative link building tactics.
Panda, another algorithm update, has focussed more on website quality. Panda initially used human reviewers to train the algorithm to recognize “quality” websites.
Which is a long winded way of saying two things:
- Google wants to show the best results possible for a search query because ultimately that’s their core product
- Google will work tirelessly to protect their core product from threats (i.e. spammy link builders, low quality websites, etc)
It’s pretty simple, but unfortunately a lot of people have responded to natural evolution with this tired refrain and dismissed the practice entirely.
SEO is dead!
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Search engine optimization should be a core part of any new website development.
Many existing websites are a complete disaster in terms of SEO, and most have lots of room for improvement.
While an in depth discussion of SEO could and does fill many blogs, books and forums, doing a basic SEO audit on your website is pretty easy.
Much like a speed test, an SEO audit will give you a lot of insight into how much attention was given to optimization when your website was built.
Also like a speed test, if your website fares poorly here, chances are good there are other problems.
1) Pick one version of http and one of www
In short: you only want one version of your website to exist. You want to pick either http or https (secure), and you want to pick either www or non-www.
The first one is a no brainer: use https. Google has been very clear how they feel, and their Chrome browser is even showing non-https as “not secure” now, which is a bad look.
If your website is not using https, you should get on that as soon as possible. It is not something you want to overlook. It’s not rocket surgery to make the switch, but it is a bit of work.
As far as www vs. non-www, you make the call. It doesn’t make any difference SEO-wise, so it’s really a style choice more than anything.
But how do you know if you’re doing this right?
The key is to have everything redirect to the specific version you choose. For instance, the url of this website is https://erim.net. I use https, and I don’t use www.
So, if I enter www.erim.net or http://erim.net into my browser’s location field, it should redirect automatically to https://erim.net. The secure, non-www version of the url should always serve when viewing a web page on erim.net.
We can get a bit more in depth in the following step.
2) Use the site: query to test how Google indexed your website
A simple trick that can be very revealing is to use the site: search operator to view all the pages of your website that Google has indexed.
Just search for site:yourdomain.com in Google and voila.
Now that you have that handy, try this.
site:yourdomain.com -inurl:https (show me all indexed pages for my domain without “https” in the url)
If you’re using https, then you shouldn’t have any results returned from this query. If you do, then you may have multiple versions of the same content indexed, which is bad. It’s also one of the low quality signals Panda will penalize you for.
Try these as well:
site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www (for a www domain)
site:yourdomain.com inurl:www (for a non-www domain)
Again, both of these queries will return indexed pages that don’t follow the rules from step one. These should be fixed so they redirect to the correct version.
Here are a few queries you can use to find other problems.
site:yourdomain.com “lorem ipsum” (your web developer forgot about pages with dummy text)
site:yourdomain.com “hello world” (your web developer didn’t delete the default WordPress post)
site:yourdomain.com filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc (Google is great at indexing PDFs and Word docs. Make sure nothing sensitive is in here.)
Once you’ve done that, let’s return to where we started and the simple site:yourdomain.com. How does it look?
The makeup of the search results is pretty simple. The first bold line is the title of the page, followed by the URL, followed by descriptive text.
Is the title clear and compelling. Is the URL short and to the point? Is the description clear and accurate? Would all three together make you want to click?
Because that’s the key, right? And here are two important facts that many people don’t realize.
- People clicking on your link will (probably) make it rank higher
- You can control all three of these components (title, URL and description)
Now that we’ve established that these things are important, let’s delve a little deeper.
3) Do a site crawl with Screaming Frog SEO Spider
This one is going to require you download some software. But it’s free, or at least it has a free version. And it has a pretty cool name. The free version will only crawl 500 URLs, but that’s plenty for our purposes.
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Once you download and install Screaming Frog, enter your full URL from step 1 (http or https/www or non-www) and click start.
Check internal pages and links
When the crawl is complete, click the Internal tab and select HTML from the filter drop down just below that tab. You should see something like this.
Take a look at the last three columns: Status Code, Status and Indexability. Most everything should have a Status Code of 200, which means everything is ok. A 301 or 302 means that URL is redirecting, and there should be a good reason for that.
The indexability column shows whether that page is asking to be indexed or not. Some pages shouldn’t be indexed (privacy policy, t&c, etc), but if you see a lot of these and you don’t know why, it could be an issue.
Lots of 404 codes means you’ve got broken internal links. That looks bad and lessens the quality of your site in the eyes of the Big G. These should be fixed post haste.
Check external links
Click on the External tab, select HTML again and have a look.
Look at the status codes again. You want to see mostly 200s, with maybe some 301s and 302s. You definitely don’t want to see a lot of 404s, which again means broken links (external in this case). These are another sign of low quality and should be fixed.
That 999 status code from LinkedIn just means they don’t like Screaming Frog and so they block it entirely.
Check your title tags
Click on the Page Titles tab and you’ll see something like this.
Like the site:yourdomain.com search query we did earlier, this will show you each of the titles of the pages crawled.
There’s one very important difference though. The crawl shows the actual title element in the page, which can differ from what Google displays in its results.
But the title element is the thing you actually have control over.
Is the title of your homepage something like “Home yourdomain.com” or “homepage” or “yourdomain.com”? That’s bad. That’s very bad from an SEO perspective and a good indication that nobody paid much attention to optimizing for search when they built your site.
Here’s mine: “WordPress Development & Support for Engaging Websites | Erim.net”
It’s simple but descriptive, and it includes both keywords and branding. That’s what you want to shoot for. You have about 65 characters to work with.
Check your meta-descriptions
Click the Meta Description tab and you’ll see this screen.
Meta descriptions are the other key element displayed in the search results. It’s also one you have control over. Make these concise, and throw in a keyword and/or a call to action.
Think of these as working in conjunction with the title to both accurately describe the page and entice the searcher to click.
If these are all blank or non-sensical, that’s another good sign that SEO was not high on the list of priorities when your website was built.
These last two I’ve covered in other posts, but they’re critical for good SEO.
4) Make sure your website is mobile friendly
Making sure your website works well on phones and tablets is crucial for SEO these days. Mobile traffic to your website may account for over 50% of the total.
Google has even started indexing web pages from a mobile-first perspective.
Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.
Again, take this seriously for both SEO and user experience.
5) Make sure your site loads fast
Speed is another issue I addressed before in my website speed test post, as well as my post on how to speed up WordPress., and it can also result in lowered search rankings and irritated users. Google has confirmed that page speed is a ranking factor, particularly on mobile.
A slow loading website probably means the overall build quality is low and there are probably other issues that should be addressed.
A slow site can also mean you’re using poor web hosting, in which case read my post on WPX Hosting, my favorite hosting company.
When a web developer overlooks performance, mobile responsiveness or search optimization, they’re not taking a long-term perspective.
They’re taking a short-term perspective that involves them finishing the project to the extent that you’re satisfied so they can get paid and move on to the next project.
But problems arise when serious underlying issues such as search, performance and mobile friendliness are totally overlooked or ignored.
Search rankings and user experience suffer, and the website you invested all that time and energy into works at a fraction of its capacity.