Follow a Regular SEO Checkup Routine to Keep Your Website in Good Health
Technical problems and errors are the common bugs to affect the well-being of a website. To keep your site in a state of good SEO health, you need to check if any technical problem or error has occurred. Make it a part of day to day website management routine. A well-optimized, error free and fast loading website can fetch loads of organic traffic. Here are some dos for regular checks that I follow to ensure the long term traffic success of my website. Now, it is your turn.
General errors are common to develop with any website. If left unchecked, they multiply in number. 404 is a common crawl error. Resolving crawl errors and timeout errors is a good SEO to make a site crawlable from cover to cover. Error checking and improving can get new and updated content indexed by search engines more quickly. Get a Google Webmaster Tools account to get a hang of crawl error handling. You had better use Firefox plugins like Http Fox and Live Http Headers and or an Http header checker to test the “Not found” and “Timed out” errors.
You have made efforts and spent time in specifying rules for canonicalized URLs for your site. The redirect rules that you have set can be left out when the site is updated. And, the canonicalization is back to the previous one. Make sure to check after certain interval if the rules that you had devised are in place. Instead of relying only on the rel=”canonical” attribute, reduce the internal duplicate content. Checking trailing slash, case redirects and www or non www redirects will reveal canonicalization problems if there is any.
Site indexation is an assessment of how many pages of a website receive how many visits from a search engine in a specific period of time. It is a powerful metric to check how many pages of the site are fetching visitors. Apart from tracing the traffic-generating web pages, site indexation reveals indexing errors like indexed duplicate content, exit URL on affiliate sites and leaked tracking. If the number of web pages indexed by Google does not match with the site indexation number, then there is a problem to solve.
Access to your development or staging server from outside the IP range of yours is an error with your website. Make sure to check if any of your development pages is in the cache of major search engines. Nothing is worse than the discovery of a development server URL with dummy products in the database. It is a known fact that customers will have a bad experience on the development server. Approach the development team to restrict access to the staging or development site from IP and redirect the search engine crawlers to the correct version of the site
Google has developed several innovative tools to help webmasters identify errors regarding the side speed issue. Keep a regular check on the performance of your site. There are useful tools under the category of Webmaster tools in the Google Labs to help speed up the site. Go from “Diagnostics” to “Crawl stats” in Webmaster tools to check out how much time it takes a page of the site to load.
Tackling such errors and canonicalization problems is a must for the SEO checkup of your website.
