Basic SEO Checklist for Website Indexing
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Let’s begin with a few basic SEO best practices that everyone should be familiar with. These points should be followed by every website as this a Basic SEO checklist for Website Indexing. Sometimes we focus on advance and technical SEO so much that we forget about the basics. This is a good place to start your SEO check.
A little knowledge of Google Search Console is very important to understand few of the below points. If you don’t know what Google Search Console is then you can click here and learn about it and then come back to this article. If you know what Google Search Console is then lets get started with the checklist.
1. Check Sitemap
Look for a sitemap on the website. A sitemap is significant because it lists all of the web pages on the website and allows search engines to explore the site more intelligently. Each webpage’s metadata is also provided by a sitemap.
Check if your sitemap is updated and has the URL that you want to index. You can also use online tools to check the validity of your sitemap. Here is the link to one such online tool :
https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html
2. Check Crawl Issues
Crawl problems happen when a search engine tries but fails to reach a page on your website. If the search engine bot is unable to crawl your website that means the search engine won’t be able to show your website on search results. As a website owner, your primary purpose is to ensure that the search engine bot can access all of the site’s pages. Check if Google bot is facing issues in crawling your website in crawl status report of Google Search Console.
In some cases the crawling issue is also because of the hosting service provider. Check all possible reasons to find a solution for your crawling issue.
3. Check Disallow in Robots.txt
Check for a robots.txt file on your website. When search engine bots crawl a website, they usually go to the robots.txt file first. Robots.txt notifies the bot and other crawlers what content on your site is and isn’t allowed to be indexed. Make sure no such command is written in your robots.txt that might harm your search ranking.
Use the tool given below, it is a robots.txt Validator and Testing tool. You can enter the website URL and select Googlebot Smartphone as the user-agent to get the results.
https://technicalseo.com/tools/robots-txt/
4. Check noindex tag in header
Check if your page uses the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header to tell search engine bots that your site should not appear in search results pages.
Use this tool to check the issue :
https://seositecheckup.com/tools/noindex-tag-test
5. Check Internal Link
Internal linking is an important & effect way to increase the authority of a webpage. Make sure that your new page is linked properly with pages that are already indexed. For discovering internal links and their anchors, use an internal link checker.
6. Check Soft 404
Let’s take a look at what a soft 404 error is?
When a page is not available, the server delivers the correct HTTP status code — 404 Not Found — to the browser, informing the browser that the page is not available.
A Soft 404 Error occurs when the server provides the requested page a 200 OK status, but Google believes the page should return a 404. If the page content appears to be a mistake or if there is no content, it may do so.
Check if page is soft 404 in coverage report of Google Search Console.
7. Check Duplicate
If there are multiple pages on the website with similar content then it will create problems in indexing the website as the search engine would be confused as to which is the main page amongst all the duplicates. In such cases we use canonical tags. Make sure that canonical tags are set in the right way. All duplicate pages must have canonical tags which should point to the main page.
8. Check Legal Issues
This is not a technical SEO point rather a safety and legal point. Do not put any such content which might land you into any legal trouble. If a page violates any legal rule or if it involves any scam, scheme, or fraud then SEO will be the last thing to worry about.
Important Point:
Content Quality is Paramount : If your website is facing no indexing issues then you should focus on the quality of content you are putting on the website. Site ranking is based on trust and good content is going to ensure that you have longer sessions and returning users. If you want to learn about Technical SEO then click here.