We developed a brief checklist to examine the ready-made website based on our expertise in IT-testing and delivering. The checklist was created from the perspective of an SEO expert and includes all the common issues that SEO specialists find while examining websites.
Going through this brief checklist is useful if you created a beautiful website and are going to release it officially to people and search engines.
The list covers technical, content, marketing, and technological issues; if all of its recommendations are followed, the site will be optimally indexed and will succeed quickly in getting noticed by search engines.
Technical aspects
- Verify that no copies of the website are accessible to search engines for indexing (developers’ test copies should be password-protected or restricted to indexing, in particular);
- Select the the primary mirror of your site (www.site.com just site.com). Check the establishment of a permanent 301 redirect from the secondary www.site.com mirror to the principal site.com version.
- Check the file called robots.txt. Its inclusion in the root folder of the site site.ru/robots.txt and the inclusion of the corresponding directives (sitemap, prohibition of indexing service pages, etc.).
- Produce a sitemap in xml format. Check the instructions by Google in order not to make a mistake. Verify the sitemap.xml for the sitemap’s accessibility and suitability, and provide a link to it in the robots.txt file.
- Ensure that pages on the site that aren’t there receive a “404” response code. Use some tools like HTTP Status Checker.
- Scan the website for broken links that lead nowhere. You can use the XENU program to your advantage (download it and follow the instructions here: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html).
- Look for HTML issues on the website. Validator: http://validator.w3.org/
- Verify that there are no CSS mistakes. Another validator is available on http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
- Calculate the site’s loading time. Here is where Google’s PageSpeed Insights can be essential: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insi…
- Examine how the website appears in various browsers…
Check the appearance of the site on your computer and mobile, ask your friends and acquaintances to do the same check on their devices. - …and with different screen resolutions (including tablets and mobile devices). Use this Google tool to test your mobile layout: https://www.google.ru/webmasters/tools/mobile-frie…
- Add a favicon (a tiny image displayed in the snippet in Google search results, in Favorites or Bookmarks in the web browser) in the .SVG format to your website.
- Make sure you have breadcrumbs on all the pages. Breadcrumbs on the site are navigation chains that display the user’s path from the root of the site to the current page. When there are bread crumbs on the site, it will not be difficult for the user to understand which section he is currently in.
- Verify that the duplicate pages of the site contain the link tag attribute rel=canonical. For instance, one canonical (primary) URL should be chosen and sent to search engines if a product card links to many catalog sections and can be opened at various addresses.
- For each page of the website, create human-readable URLs. Page addresses must use transliteration and adhere to the hierarchy. Bad URL: site.com/art-1. Good URL: site.com/catalog/cellphones/siemens-a50.
- Use structured data to improve the understanding of the content of the site by search engines. If you have a product catalog, organization data, reviews, videos, etc. on your site, be sure to markup them according to the schema.org standard. Check the finished markup using the validator.
Content and marketing
- Ensure that the website contains original texts. Make sure all test text Lorem Ipsum has been removed. Don’t forget about the texts on the search results page, the 404 error page, and so on.
- Keep your headlines in order. Per page, use just one h1 heading. You shouldn’t use headlines h1-h6 for menu items or service links.
- Verify that the Title and Description of every page on the website are distinct. Create a mechanism for automatic generation, or fill them out by hand.
- Ensure that the site has a common title. Each page’s distinct title should be created using the following formula: Page title | The site’s overall title. So, the Contacts page’s title should be performed this way: “Contacts | General title of the site.”
- Create a Google My Business account for your website. Google My Business is a convenient tool that allows you to manage information about companies and organizations. By updating and confirming business information about themselves, companies help people find them online and keep in touch with them.
- Improve the site’s images. Check that the images on the site weigh no more than 100-200 kilobytes. Add alt and title tags for them manually or automatically.
- Verify that a Google Analytics counter is set up on your website. It is best to add Google Analytics 4 using Google Tag Manager. This will ensure optimal collection of data and maintain a decent download speed.
Regardless of whether your site is new or recently updated, site audit is needed to optimize user experience, page visibility in search engines and much more.
How often do I need to do a site audit? In general, a full audit for a small site should be carried out once a year. Large sites (depending on the number of pages and traffic volume) may require more frequent audits—up to two or three times a year.
We also recommend doing mini-site audits as often as possible. Mini-audit involves checking the functionality of the site and the operation of navigation and buttons. Such audits allow you to stay up to date with the work of the site and cope with problems immediately after they are identified.
Before building a website, what else do you often check? What other factors should you consider in addition to overall performance and adherence to the terms of reference?
