![\"Dodgy](\"http:\/\/1lpd8h3xc6czn4wmw64480g8e.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/SEO-Meme-Dick-Cheney-300x199.jpg\")
How to test:<\/strong> Go through the pages of your website and check out the URLs for each page, for example: www.yoursite.com\/about-yoursite\/ and www.yoursite.com\/contact-us\/. If you notice characters or words irrelevant to the page in question, something is wrong. If the URLs are exceedingly long, something is wrong.<\/p>\n
Even if these mistakes were made by your web developer, your SEO \u2018expert\u2019 should have picked up on them and corrected them.
\u00a0<\/p>\n
No WWW redirect<\/h3>\n
Some businesses advertise their website as www.yoursite.com and others as simply yoursite.com. You want one or the other, not both.<\/p>\n
Basic inconsistencies should be avoided by your web developer and is one of the first things your SEO company should fix.<\/p>\n
How to test:<\/strong> Type your website into the Google URL bar without the \u2018www\u2019 and wait for it to load. If the URL changes to www.yoursite.com, there\u2019s a redirect in place and you\u2019re all good. If the URL is still without the \u2018www\u2019, type in your web address again, this time with the \u2018www\u2019. You want to be directed to yoursite.com without the \u2018www\u2019. If you\u2019re not, your site does not have a redirect in place.<\/p>\n If your site does not have a redirect in place, Google views the home page as two separate pages \u2013 www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com. This will be the case for each page of your site \u2013 www.yoursite.com\/about\/ and yoursite.com\/about\/. This means that any authority you\u2019re building is diluted and you may be viewed as having duplicate content, which is not great. Heading tags are strong indicators for search engines, so you want to get them right and have them optimised for your preferred search terms.<\/p>\n The biggest issues to check for are no \u2018h1\u2032 tag or multiple \u2018h1\u2032 tags. You want to see only one and the keyword should be super-relevant to your site and popular with your visitors. Google doesn\u2019t have an army of people browsing all the websites on the planet. They have spiders. They crawl the sites and they don\u2019t recognise images, so Google relies on the associated data. Image alt tags are a great way to indicate what your images are about.<\/p>\n Obviously there are hundreds of factors which help search engines determine what each website page is about, but image alt tags are easy to implement and will help rank your image within Google\u2019s image search results.<\/p>\n How to test:<\/strong> Use the feedthebot ImageSEO tool<\/a>. Enter your site\u2019s URL to grade every image on the page. Scroll down and scan for the image alt text. You want to see appropriate data for every image on your site. Have you Googled your own business name? Of course you have. What shows up in Google\u2019s search results is a title and description. This is your metadata. Both the title and description are super important for different reasons.<\/p>\n The title is still considered a strong influence on search ranking. So you want it to include targeted keywords which are relevant to your page. It is important that this title is not too short, so you\u2019re not under utilising, but also not too long, so it doesn\u2019t get cut short. The title should be no more than 70 characters.<\/p>\n The description is no longer a direct influence over search rankings, at least not by Google. But it is going to influence whether or not a person clicks on your site. So it should be unique to your site, include the likely search terms and be persuasive. Your description should also be unique for each page on your site. The length of your description should be approx 155 characters to ensure you\u2019re utilising the two lines but do not have your sentence cut short.<\/p>\n How to test:<\/strong> Head to Google again and type site:www.yoursite.com. Google will return every page it has from your site within its index. This allows you to quickly scan through each page\u2019s meta title and meta description. Does each page have a unique and optimised title? Are the descriptions unique, relevant and compelling? Schema data is a particular markup language that the key search engines agreed to use a couple of years ago. It helps them to understand our websites better, and it provides your website with an advantage.<\/p>\n How to test:<\/strong> Head to Google\u2019s Rich Snippets Tool<\/a>. Enter your URL and scroll down to find \u2018extracted structured data\u2019. Ideally, you want to see local business or organisation information including business name, address, phone number and ideally your company logo. A sitemap lays out the navigational structure of your site so the search engines can understand levels of hierarchy and how best to navigate.<\/p>\n How to test:<\/strong> You could ask your web developer or SEO person for the sitemap URL. Alternatively, try these common sitemap URLs: The quality of the websites linked to yours influences your domain authority. This is the metric that measures how much authority your website URL has, which in turn has an indirect influence on your search performance.<\/p>\n If you have links to your site from gambling and porn sites, your authority is shot.<\/p>\n Building as many links as possible, regardless of context or quality, used to be a popular strategy to get a site ranking. But now we have to be careful; links to cheap- looking sites that have no relevance to your own can be detrimental to your business. You should be aware that there are still plenty of SEO companies that do this as it can mean an easy, short-term win for them.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\nProblems with heading tags<\/h3>\n
How to test:<\/strong> There are numerous browser extensions you can install to check this. A quick and easy way is this web-based tool<\/a>. Enter your site\u2019s URL and click the Checkup button. Give it a moment, then scroll down for the results. It will show you the content included in both \u2018h1\u2032 and \u2018h2 tags. You can have multiple \u2018h2\u2032 tags but again you want to see keywords relevant to your site.
\u00a0<\/p>\nMissing far too many image tags<\/h3>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\nMeta what?<\/h3>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\nNo schema data<\/h3>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\nNo sitemap<\/h3>\n
– www.yoursite.com\/sitemap.xml
– www.yoursite.com\/page-sitemap.xml
You should see a page of links throughout your site, many of which you won\u2019t understand. If you see nothing, I would be making your web developer or SEO company work a little harder.
\u00a0<\/p>\nYour link profile is all about the numbers, not the quality or context<\/h3>\n