Best practices for SEO

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.

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:

Bing example:

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');

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.

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.

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.

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.