Technical SEO Checklist

Many times webmasters will focus on on-site factors when they need to increase their organic growth but much like a vehicle, a website does require behind the scenes maintenance so that it can perform at its best. If your website is falling behind in the ranking, there are definitely some things regarding your SEO that will need to be updated or looked at. When thinking of SEO, it tends to center on on-page factors rather than the technical issues that aren't so pretty. These are all of the tiny little sort of boring things that do not seem like much but actually make a pretty significant impact. All of these technical things are what gives your website the strong foundation that it needs so that it can support all of the great content that you are publishing on it.

When you encounter crawl errors, your website can be hindered from appearing in a search results page, even when your target audience has performed the ideal search query. The crawl error report comes about and gives details of the website's URLs that Google is not able to successfully crawl, or those that returned with an HTTP error code. There are two main sections to the error report, site errors and URL errors.

A sitemap is a file that contains a list of the web pages that are on a website. It will relay to Google and other search engines the organization of the website's content. Googlebot and other search engine crawlers will read the sitemap so that they can crawl your site with more knowledge. These sitemaps can also hold important metadata regarding the pages that are listed within the sitemap. Metadata is any information about a web page—like how often it is changed, its importance in relation to the other pages on the site, when it was last updated, and more. Sitemaps can be used to give Google metadata that is associated with particular types of content on the web pages like videos, images, and mobile content. A video entry on a sitemap can indicate the video's running time, age rating, and category. An image entry on a sitemap may tell the type, subject matter, and license.

International targeting is not something that every webmaster is familiar with, especially if their market is more localized. When a person manages multiple websites that are designed for users within a specific region that speak a specific language, it is important that the search results display the most relevant language as well as the country version of the website. There are two major things that one can do to make sure that the content will reach the audience in the correct language: URL level targeting and site-wide targeting.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of checking each piece of content on a website, and then compiling it into a large list. When you opt to perform a full content inventory, you will make a complete list of every single item of content on the website. This will include all pages as well as any assets like videos or downloadable files. In lieu of this, you may opt to perform a partial content inventory. This is simply a listing of a specific subset of the website's content. A partial inventory could include the top few levels of a hierarchical website, or the most recent content created in a specific time period (like the last 6 months). This will still include all sections of the website. To dwindle it down even further, a content sample is a less detailed collection of content pieces from the website.