Paul Rone-Clarke SEO Expert is happy to share the following.
A quick distinction here. In this second (very belated part) I am not talking about content. Yes, content should be a massive part of your onsite optimization, however it deserves a post (or maybe even two posts) of its own. This is specifically about technical onsite SEO.
In this post I’m talking specifically about the technical aspects. The things that go on behind the scenes, hidden on your server or hosting, the HTML code that isn’t immediately visible or apparent to a visitor. With that out of the way, let’s crack on.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Website Analysis Tools For Onsite SEO
There are many tools that can help you get to grips with what is going on with your website. The Cpanel you probably have access to through your server hosting company likely can provide nearly all the information you need, but if you are stuck then sites like;
- https://validator.w3.org/
- http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
- http://website-link-checker.online-domain-tools.com/
will validate your HTML, check the speed of your host and look to see that any links on a page resolve (are not broken) in that order. All for free. Neat eh?
A Typical Site View – On Page Issues
Clik here to view.
A look at your onsite SEO via Powersuite
This image is a screen grab from SEO Powersuite of a certain sites onsite SEO situation. There are certain things I have not checked so far with this tool, but in general I use it because it does all of the above and quite a lot more. If you are running dozens of reports a month then having it all under one roof and being able to print off reports for your website or digital marketing clients is a great help.
The biggies are here though.
5XX Errors
Yikes, you don’t want any of these. These represent the very worst that can happen not just in terms of onsite SEO, but more than likely immediately preventing visitors from accessing all or part of your website. A page that returns an error from the 500 range is a real problem, It’s a site access, denied access or restricted access error. It means that, more than likely people cannot see the page or the page is completely down.
Bad permissions, invalid commands or errors with your host are the common causes. Get one of these errors and if you value your website stop everything, get into your CPanel or FTP access and check it out.
This article isn’t about fixing every error, but here’s a great resource to get you started if you should be unfortunate enough to get hit by one of these.
404 Setup
The 404 page is the page normally set up that visitors that have incorrect or obsolete URLs get shunted to. It may mean the visitor mis-spelt the URL, the link they clicked was not correctly set up or (typically) you have deleted pages that visitors are still trying to reach.
If the root domain is to your website but the sub-folder no longer exists, then the 404 page is where most set ups will push the visitor. Make sure that:
- You have a 404 page (link to setting up a 404 page. It’s really easy in most cases)
- It has something useful or helpful on it – not just an error code in the corner.
- It is set up with links to good pages on your site
- You might want to consider a quick apology for the inconvenience to the visitor. It might not be your fault, but assume it is.
30X Pages – Redirects
The 300 series of codes are reserved for redirects. URL’s that either no longer exist or have been moved or changed in some way. 30X works with wildcard subfolders so a 303 of the root domain as in www dot mysite dot com/ will redirect everything after the backslash.
For example, if you have a folder (think category or tag) you no longer want people to arrive at and would prefer to send them somewhere else you could redirect;
www dot mysite dot com/obsolete_folder
This will send everyone who tries to access anything in obsolete folder and all child folders somewhere else that you can specify. like “shiny new folder” for example.
Stackoverflow has a great QnA on this right here.
Warning!
Many of you will already know that 30x codes can be used to redirect entire websites and in some cases (and still to this day) can and has been used to try and get around a total Google site ban by redirecting an entire banned site to a new unbanned domain. Google are aware that this is a thing and now take a little more care and scrutiny over ranking and trusting large 30x blocks of content.
HTML, W3C and Getting The Coding Right
I wouldn’t say I love WordPress, but if I was honest it makes life so darn easy. Onsite SEO has some quite technical aspects, luckily the community for WordPress and most other CMS for that matter, have made it much easier for the internet marketer to get to grips with these issues.
Take this very site 6 months ago. It had a theme I loved, however I was well aware that there was a new update of HTML and some of the specifications had been updated. I also knew that what constituted “responsive” and “mobile ready” had been refined and that my theme no longer was completely compatible. I ran it through the tests and got pretty average results.
Back in the day this would have been a real ache. Having to re-write code or spend time and money on a whole new website.
Not any more. I spent a day checking out new free themes or ones from places like Themeforest that were compatible. I had a choice of hundreds to choose from ranging from completely free to about $40 with their current coding status displayed. “100% HTML 5 compliant” and “Meets current responsive / mobile friendly specifications”.
I just about have the skill to rewrite a theme – just about. However it is not even nearly a cost effective process when a couple of hours can turn up a great free theme with all that compliance stuff already sorted. So I suggest you just do that if you have WordPress or a CMS that has them updates.
If you have a custom site, you may need to go back to your designer or learn this.
Meta Data
- Are all your images tagged with Alt Tags?
- Is your title the right length to fit in the space provided by search engines.
- Does your page have a meta description
- Have you duplicated any tags
These are very simple fixes with most CMS. Worpress has a range of free plugins that warn of most of these errors during the content adding process making it pretty hard to mess up. Yoast, is a pretty good example of a plug in that hand holds you while you add content to make sure you tick all these boxes. Google “Yoast WordPress plug in” to see one of the best.
Again though. If you don;t have a CMS that allows this functionality, it’s off to the web designer or more than likely doing it yourself via FTP
The post Everything You Need To Know: Onsite SEO appeared first on Scritty's SEO Blog.