Technical SEO analysis
Technical SEO analysis of a website
On larger sites, technical problems are common and when your technical SEO does not work perfectly, it means you do not have a good chance of competing on Google’s search engine.
The infrastructure of a website is about the technology of both the hardware and the software that drives your website and your online presence. If your site does not work as it is thought, for example, that it is slow or has a lot of errors then the entire site is affected.
A technical analysis means that we investigate the site for issues that search engines get when they spindle the site. Many sites have technical issues like remarks, redirects, url parameters, sitemaps, noindex, robot.txt files and canonical tags or editorial things that need to be arranged as too little amount of text on a particular page or duplicate content. In Google Search Console, you can see a subset of the errors that Google is complaining about.
What does a search engine optimiser do when doing a technical SEO analysis?
A technical analysis may contain several different parts.
- Always start by checking the robots.txt file located on the root of the server. The Robots.txt file is the first file Google visits to a site and there may be issues like an entire site is disabled from being viewed.
- Information structure (Sitemaps, internal link structure, menus, 404-or). Often, you need to clean up a website and make sure that 404 pages are removed and pointed to working pages.
- Code optimisation (html code and features)
- Site speed (compression, style-sheet minimization and javascript, CDNs, etc.)
- Error management of technical faults (see below)
- IP address – The site may be on a web host that has multiple sites on the same IP address, which affects performance but also that it may be a site that has received spam alerts on the same IP.
- The site may be located in a location far from the target audience
- The site may use its own caching mechanisms at the web provider (such as Varnish), which means that it is not possible to use https with external CDN services like Cloud Flare.
- Indexing – Is the site indexed in Google and Bing in a good way?
- Availability – missing metadata, they are too long or short meta descriptions
- Information structure – Is the site built based on the keywords we want to optimise against.
- Duplicated content – so the search engines cannot determine which page is the one you want to rank on. It may be that you cut and paste from other pages or that there are development servers that are out online and should have been hidden.
- Anchor text in links pointing to different pages.
- Strong pages on one’s own site where content is deleted and where it indicates linkage.
- Redirects pages that point incorrectly. It is very common, for example, to change the platform that you have not taken care of the corrections correctly.
Other components included in the technical SEO are speed, mobile adaptation. Often, you work with tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools in combination with an arsenal of different SEO tools.
Technical onsite SEO audit
Scanning a site for errors is the first step when you do a technical SEO analysis and take a few minutes. What takes time is to prioritize different parts of what is most important and to put up in project management systems. Correctly, errors are found in working methods on the web-based action when creating information, which means possibilities for improving routines and processes.
Image: Examples of violations. Often sites have thousands of errors that need to be cleaned and one goal can be to reduce the number of errors. A site that has a few years on the neck usually has a lot of errors in link building that has arisen when changes have been made.
In the above example:
Those marked with red crosses are major SEO issues.
The <img> tag does not have an ALT attribute defined. Photos lacking all descriptions – An all description is a piece of HTML code that is a text description of an image that will be displayed when the image itself is not displayed on the screen, giving your photos better visibility on the organic. When the images are optimised, it is important if there is a word that has high competition. For example, if there is a logotype that lacks all descriptions, the error will be on each page.
The page contains a large amount of script code: is a bad error especially if you have a cache mechanically, but you can, for example, minimize HTML, javascript and CSS files. Remove HTML comments or use a better and easier theme.
The description is missing. The meta description that Google lists in their searches are great to customize so you get a text that people click on. In WordPress, the Yost plugin may be incorrectly configured, but it is very often web publishers who do not use meta descriptions, which is the first thing Google shows when users search for a word.
If there is no meta description, then Google will add and add it. Meta descriptions are of no importance to SEO: N, but on the other hand, what CTR you have on organic search.
The page contains unnecessary redirects. Unnecessary remarks – many sites have remarks (301: or 302: or) from the first page, but there are also pages that you need to fix. 301 reminders are usually the most appropriate method of referring visitors.
The page contains multiple <H1> tags. H1 or is the largest heading level and there should only be one on each page.
Invalid markup – This is when the site is not coded to 100%.
The page contains multiple canonical formats. It should only be on one page and canonical is used to point out the page that visitors want to access. When a site has pages with identical content or multiple URLs for the same page, it is possible to use canonical URLs to show Google which page is the main source of content.
The page contains broken hyperlinks. Broken hypertext links make the site not as good quality. If it’s really bad, these are on the first page or in the menus. In WordPress, there is a plugin like Broken Link Checker that helps you find wrong external pages.
The title is too long. The title is too long.
The URL for the hyperlink is broken. Of course, there are corrected links that do not work. It may be that you have entered the wrong domain or that the site you have pointed out has been deleted or renamed.
Large parts with script code – often compress and merge code.
The <h1> tag is missing. <h1>: a is the title and you should have a header per page according to the HTML specification. However, it has no correlation with your ranking but lower heading levels that <h4> may have.
There are too many references for this resource. You should not have excessive menu systems and links in the footer if you have a small site. Google’s official recommendation is a maximum of 100 links on one page, while Searchmetric’s study of ranking factors 2015 points to 150 links being max.
The page contains invalid markup. There are online tools that you can use to verify that the HTML code is good and minimize the number of errors.
The page was excluded by a noindex attribute. On major sites, it’s not uncommon to put noindex which means telling Google to not visit the page.
The page contains too many hyperlinks. Often the error is that you have a large footer text with lots of links or large navigation menus.
The title is missing – big and grossly wrong because the title describes what the page is about which means a lot for your ranking.
The redirection response results in redirection. Refreshments are never good. There are Chrome plugins as redirection path, where you can see the issue more clearly if it’s a reminder from the homepage. I have seen projects where you have had multiple remarks from the first page, with the result that Google was unable to read the page.
Link audits and check external links
Importance of continually cleaning and removing low-quality links
In addition to the technical SEO analysis, we also audit the links that go to your website and to different landing pages. It may be about the low quality of links that you do not control but that harm your site. If your site has been hacked, it’s not uncommon that there are several external links that need to be removed with Google Disawow links . It may be that the site has been subjected to a man-in-the-middle attack where the hacker tries to get linkage to their own sites.
