Best practices for SEO

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Best practices for SEO

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Pads with one letter from the inscription "SEO Audit" on each
On this page
  1. General
  2. WordPress
  3. Performance: rendering and loading
  4. Quality
  5. On-Page SEO Checklist

General

Tell search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site using robots.txt

A robots.txt file can be found at the root of your website. As an example, for the website www.example.com, the robots.txt file is located at www.example.com/robots.txt. The robots.txt file is a plain text file that adheres to the Robots Exclusion Standard. One or more rules are contained in a robots.txt file. Each rule restricts or allows access to a single file location on the domain or subdomain where the robots.txt file is hosted. Unless you declare otherwise in your robots.txt file, all files are assumed to be crawlable.

See Sitelint’s robots.txt file content.

Set search page to follow links, but no indexInternal search results are generally the last pages that search engines like to send their visitors to. However, links on a search result page are still quite valuable, and you should definitely want search engines to follow them. As a result, all links should be followed, and the robots meta tag should be as follows:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, max-image-preview:large, index">
Build and submit a sitemapA sitemap is a file that contains information about your site’s pages, videos, and other assets, as well as the relationships between them. This file is read by search engines in order to crawl your site more efficiently. A sitemap tells the search engine which pages and files on your site you believe are important, as well as providing valuable information about these items. For example, when was the page last changed, and are there any different language versions of the page? See the Sitelint sitemap file.
Creating the page title

Once you have a specific topic, enter it into several search engines and see how users define it. Examples: a few examples for sentence Best practices for SEO.

Google example:

Google search results and section "People also ask": What are your top 5 SEO recommendations? What are the 3 core must haves of SEO? How to optimize SEO in 2023? How to master SEO 2023?
Google search results with the bottom part that contains suggested keywords

Bing example:

Bing keywords suggestion

WordPress

Create canonical URL for the category page

WordPress auto-generates the canonical URL link for the single post and page, but not for the Category page type. To achieve that, you can add the following code to your functions.php:

function addCanonicalLinkForCategoryPage()
{
  if (is_category()) {
    $categories = get_the_category();
    $categoryId = $categories[0]->term_id;

    echo '<link rel="canonical" href="' .  get_category_link($categoryId) . '">';
  }
}

add_action('wp_head', 'addCanonicalLinkForCategoryPage');

Performance: rendering and loading

Delay loading non-critical resourcesIn most cases, we are loading everything right now. However, that impacts the loading and rendering performance. Various browsers have various limits for maximum connections per host name. If the connection limit is reached, further requests will wait until connections free up. Consider reviewing those resources that can be loaded with delay. Example: analytics.
Enable protocol HTTP/2The primary goals for HTTP/2 are to reduce latency by enabling full request and response multiplexing, minimize protocol overhead via efficient compression of HTTP header fields, and add support for request prioritization and server push.
Static assets
  1. Keep the HTML file as small as possible.
  2. Minify and compress JavaScript and CSS stylesheets. Compression could be done automatically by enabling gzip or brotli compression for all static assets.
  3. Try combining all scripts or styles into one file. This will reduce the total number of HTTP requests.
  4. Configure the output cache and the cache expiration time. Example for Apache cache or Nginx cache settings.

Read also 8 tips to speed up image loading.

Quality

Delay loading non-critical resourcesIn most cases, we are loading everything right now. However, that impacts the loading and rendering performance. Various browsers have various limits for maximum connections per host name. If the connection limit is reached, further requests will wait until connections free up. Consider reviewing those resources that can be loaded with delay. Example: analytics.
Enable protocol HTTP/2The primary goals for HTTP/2 are to reduce latency by enabling full request and response multiplexing, minimize protocol overhead via efficient compression of HTTP header fields, and add support for request prioritization and server push.
Static assets
  1. Always provide an alternative description (attribute alt) for the image. It will not only help screen reader users, but also search engines understand what exactly is on the image.
  2. Implement Open Graph and Schema.

    Open Graphmeta tags are snippets of code that control how URLs are displayed when shared on social media.

    Schema markup (schema.org) is a structured data vocabulary that helps search engines more accurately understand the information on your website. Normally, HTML can’t provide enough tags or elements to describe the content more precisely. See example schema for the product.

On-Page SEO Checklist

Do you have user traffic analytics set up?Use any tool for tracking user activities to improve your site.
Is your page crawlable?Ensure the rules in robots.txt do not block crawlers from crawling your site.
Is your page indexable?Ensure your site is indexed by selected search engines. For example, use URL Inspection in Google or Bing. The URL Inspection tool allows you to check whether a URL could be indexable and offers details about the search engine-indexed versions of a certain website.
Is your page title wrapped in an H1 element?The H1 heading, which is often the biggest heading on a page, describes the primary subject of the page. It conveys the page’s relevance to search engines. Note: The H1 should always be unique for the page and should not be the same on several pages.
Are important keywords from the page title in the meta description?Both your page title and your meta description should contain important keywords. This enhances the chance that someone who searches will find the keyword phrase or search query they were looking for. The correct target keywords at the beginning of each meta description can help boost a page’s click-through rate.
Are important keywords from the page title in the URL?The URL may improve SEO if it contains relevant keywords. The URL is taken into account by search engines as a sign of the page’s content when they crawl and index web pages. Search engines can better grasp the content and relevancy of a website by including keywords in the URL. In search engine results, visitors frequently scan the URL; if it contains relevant terms, this might improve the probability that they will click on your link.
Has your URL a friendly structure?SEO-friendly URLs are short, easy to read, and contain keywords that describe the content of a web page.
Use outbound linksLinking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Links often enable readers to learn more, investigate your sources, and grasp how your information relates to their inquiries. It’s possible that search engines want to see outbound connections that show you believe the website you’re connecting to is a fantastic fit for users.
Use multimediaUse images, videos, and diagrams to reduce the bounce rate and increase time on site.
Fix broken links

Broken links are hyperlinks on a webpage that lead to another webpage that is unavailable for various reasons (the page does not exist, the server is not responding, and the like).

Search engines are aware that broken links appear often on the internet. Broken links have a negative impact on the user experience, which is a ranking factor that has an indirect impact on SEO. These links could be quite annoying and ruin the experience. Therefore, you shouldn’t anticipate an increase in traffic or ranking as a result of fixing broken links. Instead, focus on ensuring that customers have a positive browsing experience as they navigate your website.

Broken links can harm SEO since they waste potential link value that may be used elsewhere. The link flow is interrupted, wasting the link juice that may have gone to alternative sites on your website. Broken links for outbound links may give search engines the impression that your website lacks authority. It is nevertheless worthwhile to optimize, even though these won’t have a significant influence on your website’s rankings or traffic.

Building inbound with links rel="nofollow" vs follow

Every time a website adds a dofollow link back (the attribute rel does not contain the value nofollow) to your website, your authority grows and your rankings increase.

Meanwhile, when a website inserts a nofollow link (rel="nofollow") back to your website, authority is not passed.

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