Find and Fix Technical Issues on Your Website

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies

304 ratings

University of California, Davis

Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies

304 ratings

Course 5 of 6 in the Specialization Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This course focuses on technical, mobile and social strategies for increasing site traffic. Learn how to build SEO for international audiences through content localization, global team alignment and optimizing for local search engines. Discover techniques to optimize mobile-friendly websites, get mobile apps discovered, and leverage social media to drive organic SEO traffic. You will also learn how to identify key SEO metrics and collect, interpret, validate, and report success to your clients and stakeholders.

From the lesson

Introduction

Welcome to this first module where you will discover how technical search engine optimization (SEO) can improve your website. You will discuss and use web metrics as you compare performance analysis tools and plug-ins. You will be able to find and fix problems, heighten visibility, improve site architecture, and accelerate page load speed for your own website. You will be able to take the steps necessary to conduct a website audit and finally, you’ll discover strategies to achieve positive change by working well with teams and stakeholders.

Welcome to Technical Search Engine Optimization2:41

Discover What Technical SEO Can Do for Your Website4:07

Compare Website Performance and Analysis Tools6:55

Compare Plug-in Tools for Technical SEO5:14

Find and Fix Technical Issues on Your Website6:22

Heighten Visibility with Google Quick Answers4:48

Boost Website Accessibility5:39

Take Action with Analysis Tools to Improve Site Architecture6:10

Analyze and Accelerate Page Load Speed6:05

Conduct and Document a Website Audit6:28

Achieve Positive Change Working with Stakeholders8:05

Meet the Instructors

Dave Lloyd
Senior Manager, Global Search Marketing
Adobe Systems

Hello!

In this lesson let's get into technical issues you may have with your content.

What do I mean by this?

Well, I want to explore the schema.org and structure data initiatives in more detail.

Let's also talk a little bit more about canonical tags and

duplicate content issues.

And finally, we'll determine if these are the right technical developments

that you want to enable for your site.

Technical SEO and content SEO have differences.

But there is overlap where technical improvements can affect your

visible content.

Tools like Google Search Console, or

Screaming Frog identifed problem issues and allow you to make changes.

Examples of problems that need to be fixed include missing title or

description tags, titles or

descriptions that are too short or too long or maybe the H1 tag is missing.

Be sure to use tools to find and fix content issues.

That's a simple start, but let's look at additional ways to improve your content.

Schema.org is a great website that's worth checking out

because it focuses on structured data.

Over the last few years,

many search engines have rallied around such endeavors.

It helps the engines understand data at a very specific level.

The most common use of schema.org is for local search where name, address and

phone number, NAP, is often being wrapped in schema code.

You can also find books, movies and events where schema code is enabled and

helps make that content more visible.

What users are seeing in the search results is an improved markup for

videos or for name, address, and phone number, or

a way that the knowledge graph or the video module within search

results might be further enabled by appropriate schema markup.

Now this is an advanced initiative even within technical SEO and

does require some bandwidth to act on.

However, understanding structured data is important for the future,

especially as mobile and voice search become even more common.

It helps position your skill set in an advanced way with your clients.

So consider the schema.org initiative.

Let's look at canonical tags.

In the world of content management, it's common for

the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs.

So canonical tags are simply awaited tell Google the official and

original version of the page.

You're setting a single line of code on a page and

indicating whether the canonical is in place.

Ideally, every page should have a canonical tag.

So you're using this to improve linking and ranking signals for that primary or

original content as distinct from similar or

duplicate content distributed throughout your website.

In WordPress, canonicals are setup by default.

And many of the tools I've covered can help determine where you have

canonical issues.

The quickest way to determine the canonical pattern for an individual page

is to check the view source of a website and look for rel=canonical.

You will also need to address duplicate content issues.

There are tools that allow you to identify duplicate content issues.

This include Copyscape, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Deep Crawl.

Duplication might be in title tags or

meta descriptions that are identical to other content.

What you're trying to do here is give variety, and

relevance to the pages, that you've already got ranking and indexed.

So that the engine's C value, in that content, for the distinct

intent and search query that represents what users are looking for.

Meta tags are a great way for

webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites.

I want to focus on a few meta tags that Google understands that are not

technical in nature but help inform how content can be written better or

code it in such a way that makes the content more valuable to the user.

So title and meta description are obvious meta tags.

But if you want to not index a page, or

prevent it from being indexed, you could use the noindex inclusion.

You could do this through the robots.txt files.

It's also common and do the set to category level.

Noindex is a great way to prevent that page from being indexed.

Nofollow prevents Googlebot from following links from this page.

It doesn't mean that links though aren't followed from other bots or

other pages that may link to that URL.

Noindex and nofollow are two meta tags that Google understands

that are worth considering for your site where the need presents itself.

A site URL structure should be as simple as possible.

URL should be logical and intelligible to humans.

Use robot.txt to block Googlebots access

to problematic URLs, whether they be dynamic or

URLs that generates search results that you don't want visible in Google's

results or URLs with confusing parameters or session IDs that don't make sense.

Use a combination of good URL structure, robots.txt,

and appropriate use of the parameters functionality within Google Search Console

to clean up the URL structure visible in search results.

Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming

the unnecessary parameters to make them simpler for engines to crawl.

Ajax is a good approach for users but if your starting from scratch,

I recommend building your site structure using HTML.

Keep it real simple.

Once you have the site pages, links and

content in place you can improve the appearance and interface using Ajax.

You'll likely have links requiring JavaScript for Ajax functionality so

when you create this link, format them so

that they'll offer a static link as well as calling in JavaScript function.

Google includes a lot more information on their Ajax calling document within their

development console and I recommend you check that out for more information.

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