ParadoxLabs_Tips_Tools_To_Check_Your_SEO

As an IRCE (Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition) attendee, I had the great experience of seeing Stephan Spencer, author of The Art of SEO, conduct live SEO reviews on sites to give tips on how to improve and follow best practices. From the short reviews of each site, I was able to compile a few tips and tools you can use to review your own site.

1. If you want to dive in to SEO, find valuable resources and educate yourself.

You can learn from the man himself with these books:

And, you can visit ScienceofSEO.com to access free training and more valuable resources that will give you the background you need to tackle SEO intelligently. These are just a few resources from Stephan Spencer to get you started, but if you really want to learn, don’t stop there. The internet is full of awesome blogs, Google-owned blogs included, with tons of useful information.

2. Review your source code.

It’s imperative to review the source code on your site. Look for issues with your on-page elements, like keyword stuffing in your title tag and meta descriptions. That is a huge problem for your site and one that came up several times during the live reviews. Be sure to check your pages, especially if you’ve been outsourcing your SEO to other companies or using a cheap SEO service. Surprisingly, keyword stuffing is still a problem and it’s one that can cause big problems for your business.

The on-page SEO elements of your pages are the foundation for SEO on your site; if those are bad, you’re starting off on a shaky foundation. Thankfully, most of these are quick fixes. A crawl test with a tool like the Moz Crawl Test or Screaming Frog can help you pull information from a large number of pages to then be able to analyze your on-page elements like: URL, page title, meta description, headings, etc.

Title Tag

This is the line of text that becomes the title of your page in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and it’s usually the first thing users will see when they’re scanning results. These should be unique to each page and give users (and the search engines) a clear picture of what they can expect to find on the page. So, make sure the keyword focus of that page is included in the title tag and comes first; unless we’re talking about your homepage, in which case, you may want the brand name to come first.

You also want to make sure you keep it short and simple. Title tags, and meta descriptions too, are limited by a certain pixel-width before they are truncated. A general rule of thumb to avoid getting cut off in the SERPs is to keep your title tag 55 characters or less. To avoid potential trouble with the search engines, definitely keep it under 65 characters. A character counting tool is a big help when creating title tags and meta descriptions, so find one you like and keep it bookmarked for easy access.

Meta Description

The meta description does not do much for you in terms of the search engines, but you do not want to ignore them – they might not offer a huge bump in visibility, but they can certainly hurt you. If they’re left empty, the search engines will often auto-fill them for you, which ends up ineffective and not a great representation of your brand. Duplicate meta descriptions don’t help you either and may even end up hurting you, so make sure you’re taking the time to make them unique to each page you’re indexing.

Your meta descriptions end up as the text below your title tag in the SERPs and are opportunities for you to further explain what users can expect to see on the page and entice them to click on your listing. For these, it’s best to stick to 155 characters or less to avoid getting cut off. For more information on title tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags too, check out this quick on-page SEO guide.

Meta Keywords

This is an irrelevant part of your meta tag. Seriously, don’t bother using it. It’s pointless to users, the search engines ignore it completely, and all it does is give your competitors a clear view into exactly the keywords you’re trying to focus on. They’ll get an idea of this from their own tools and observation, but there’s no need to spell it out for them so clearly. So, if you’re using this field in meta tags across your site, do yourself a favor and remove it.

Headings

Breaking up your content into sections with headings makes your content easier for search bots to crawl and for users to scan. Plus, it’ll force you to think about what you’re writing and, more importantly, who you’re writing for. Don’t forget to use your keywords here. You definitely do not want to stuff keywords in to headings, but if it makes sense to include them, do it.

3. Check your server headers and redirects.

Every page on your site should return the proper server response code. A crawl test can help you identify the response codes on a large number of pages, but if you just need to check or verify a couple of pages, you can use a server header checker. Things will vary per site, but overall, you want to 301 redirect any 404 pages to the most relevant live page. If there isn’t a relevant page still live, don’t be afraid to play with your 404 page template to encourage further engagement on your site. These 16 examples might inspire you with an idea or two for your own. You also want to make sure that if you’re dealing with permanent redirects you are using a 301, not a 302. A 302 is a temporary redirect and does not pass any authority or link equity – a 301 does.

4. Treat each page like a landing page.

A landing page’s sole purpose is to encourage a visitor to convert or complete a desired action. By viewing each page of your site as a landing page, you’ll have to think about what the main focus of that page should be and what you want the visitor to do once they land there. Plus, you’ll have to focus on valuable, compelling content for that page. Backlinko has a great post with 16 actionable tips for SEO copywriting that is full a great information to get you started (and is a really good example of valuable content). Making useful, valuable content your focus ends up being a better experience for your visitors and gains you points with the search engines, so why not do it?

However, no matter what you end up doing, you’ll need to do some keyword research to make sure you’re focusing on the right terms for your visitors. You want to use the terms users are actually using to find you, not the terms or “vanity keywords” you think they should or would be using. The results of your keyword research go into creating your title tag, meta description, headings, and content for that page. There are a few tools you can use to do this:

Remember, when it comes to keywords, keep it relevant and go for the terms with a high search volume and low competition or low CPC (cost per click). If you already have a handle on keyword research, but want to take a few steps to improve it, you can start with this blog post. 

5. Keep an eye on your links.

When it comes to your links, you need to be careful and aware of what’s happening in your link profile. Old, irrelevant link building tactics from years ago have the ability to potentially hurt you today. There’s always the chance of spam sites targeting you or even your competitors throwing negative SEO your way to mess with your backlink profile. Is it shady? Of course, and it’s not right, but it can happen and it can hurt you. Regular link review and cleanup is a healthy practice for your site anyway and one you should be engaging in, especially with the refreshes and new releases of Google’s Penguin algorithm update. These are just a few tools that can help you examine your links and keep an eye on what’s going on:

6. Add schema markup where you can.

Schema markup is underused by ecommerce sites, but it is so valuable. This is what will give you those rich snippets on your listings in the SERPs that make it so much more attractive to users. Keep in mind – not every attribute can or should have schema added to it; here, too, you want to choose elements that will most benefit the user. Using schema.org, you can get started with structured data. Once you have an overview of what schema markup is and how it works, you can find a generator you like and then test your markup with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool before adding it to your page.

7. Check your robots.txt.

When it comes to robots.txt, if you don’t want a page to be indexed, then you need to use the noindex tag, not the disallow tag. Also, something to keep in mind, Google is the only search engine who reads robots.txt, Yahoo & Bing do not. However, if you use the meta-robots tag to add directives, you’ll get them all.

8. Beware of the “infinite space issue” and canonicalize accordingly.

The “infinite space issue” is one that many ecommerce sites find themselves dealing with. This is when there are very large numbers of links available for search bots to index, but also provide very little to no content for indexing. These generally end up being those pages from filtered searches, you know, the URLs with tons of parameters where there isn’t much content on the page.

If you’re suffering from this issue, Google has a number of ways to fix it, including proper tagging in your robots.txt file, strategic use of the nofollow link attribute, and, of course, adding canonical tags that link back to the original, unsorted page. Canonical tags can get complicated, especially if you’re weighing them against redirects, so if you’re feeling a little confused, be sure to check out this short post.

9. Optimize your site for speed.

Speed matters. You used to have 3 seconds to load your site before most users bounced, now it’s down to 2. The faster you can get your site to load, the better. To do this, you can optimize your server for maximum performance, make sure your JavaScript file layers are loading parallel, not serially, compressing images, etc. These tools & resources can help you see what’s happening & what to do for a faster loading site:

10. Mobile-friendliness is your friend.

A mobile-friendly site is a necessity. Generally, a responsive design created with mobile users in mind will cover it, but not always. Sometimes a few elements needs to be tweaked here and there to ensure mobile users are seeing exactly what they need to. An easy way to test this and get some hints for improvement is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Thinking about your site in terms of what is friendly for mobile users forces you to keep things short, simple, and very clear, which oftentimes helps your desktop users as well. 

When it comes to good on-page SEO, you’ll find that sometimes small changes can have big results or maybe even no results at all. At the same time, avoiding best practices can put you in a bad situation; one mistake can end up with big consequences or maybe none at all. That’s a lot of pressure! Finding the right tools to help you can relieve a bit of the pressure and make things so much easier for you. Plus, if you’re following best practices, continuing to educate yourself to stay on top of the changing industry, and making changes with data on your side and your user in mind, you’ll be able to stay in the clear and increase your visibility too.