How to conduct a technical SEO audit Before you start promoting a search engine site, you need to conduct a detailed internal audit in order to identify and eliminate possible errors. The presence of technical errors on the site can negatively affect its ranking, which in turn leads to a decrease in search traffic and positions in search engines. To identify technical errors, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit of the site. Topic contents Toggle Methods of conducting a technical audit for search engine optimization Advantages of using the Screaming Frog program Searching for broken links How do you identify pages that have broken links?
How to find broken links on a website page?
Why are broken links bad in search engines? Find links with 301 redirects How to identify pages with 301 redirects?
Getting rid of these links for SEO?
Find duplicate pages How to find duplicate titles? Parsing h1 headers.
How can I find the pages where it is missing
main h1 title? Ways to conduct a technical SEO audit One of the main assistants in this complex and labor-intensive task for us is the Screaming Frog desktop program. We have collected the recommendations of SEO specialists of the WebPromo agency for effective Internet marketing and have prepared a step-by-step guide to technical site verification.
Advantages of using the Screaming Frog program Screaming Frog is a program that works on how to conduct a technical SEO audit as it crawls websites and its main features are: searching for broken links. Find links with redirects. And search for duplicate pages.
Image analysis. Find pages that are missing meta tags or the main H1 title. Extracting elements from website pages.
Look for blank pages or useless pages where there is very little content. With this program, you can analyze pages closed in robots.txt, check the presence of alt tags and their correct filling in images, the presence of the Canonical attribute, and much more. Screaming Frog can crawl the entire site, either a specific directory or a manually selected list of pages.
In order not to create a heavy load on the server, you can stop scanning at any time. Searching for broken links We deliberately skipped the topic “Setting up Screaming Frog” as there are a large number of manuals on how to conduct a technical SEO audit by setting up the program, descriptions of the interface and introductory information on how to work with the program and crawl the site on the network. Let us go directly to the technical analysis of the site as follows: Crawling the site to search for broken links, you need to find the “Response Code” tab “Customer Error (4xx)” on the right. Now we see the list of broken links, if any, on the site.
How do you identify pages with broken links? It is necessary to select a link or select several links and at the bottom left select the “Internal Links” tab. At the bottom, a list of pages where the selected link is located or a list of selected links will appear.
It is recommended to remove these links, as a large number of broken links can negatively affect the site's ranking. How to find broken links on a website page? If the broken link is not eye-catching when viewing the page, you should open the site code “ctrl + shift + i”, then open the search form in the code “ctrl + a” and drive in the address of the broken link.
Broken links can be placed in page texts in this case, you need to remove the links manually. In some cases, the link may be placed on several pages at once. This indicates that the link is in the menu, in the footer, or in some other scrolling block.
In this case, you do not need to go to each page individually, but you can simply delete or replace the link and here it helps to conduct a technical SEO audit. Why are broken links bad in search engines? Broken links do not directly affect the site's ranking, and there are no penalties for broken links from search engines.
However, they can spend part of the search robots' crawl budget, lower the site's quality score, and increase the number of bounces. In addition, broken links do not transfer weight to other pages, and if there are links to them from external sources, the weight of this link will not be taken into account. Therefore, broken links must be removed from the site or replaced with valid ones.
Look for links with 301 redirects 301 redirection Redirection from the old address to the new address, if the page address has changed, but the content has not changed This is done only to prevent broken links from appearing. But it is better to immediately place a link with a response code of 200 to an existing page. If it is not possible to change the links, set up a 301 redirect. Usually we get rid of these links.
Searching for links with 301 redirects is performed in a similar way to searching for broken links. It is necessary to find the “Response Code” tab “Forwarding (3xx)” on the right. We now see the list of links with 301 redirects and other redirects with 3xx codes if available on the site.
How to identify pages that contain 301 redirects? These links are searched in the same way as broken links. It is necessary to select a link or select several links and at the bottom left select the “Internal Links” tab.
At the bottom, a list of pages where the selected links are located or a list of links, as is the case with broken links, will appear. It is located near the Outlinks tab, where the pages to which redirects are sent are indicated.
Getting rid of these links for SEO?
A small number of these links will not affect the site's ranking in any way. However, if there are many links with redirects or these links are present on all pages in the menu, footer or other comprehensive blocks, it is recommended to replace these links with the existing pages to which redirects are configured. These links do not carry information about why the redirection to another address occurred, making it difficult for search engines to process this redirection.
Look for Duplicate Pages The presence of duplicate pages negatively affects a site's ranking, because out of two pages, search engines are more likely to index one more relevant page. Duplicate pages can be considered pages with different content, but the same title tags. It happens that pages of services and articles have identical title tags, and such pages are recognized as duplicates.
At the same time, the intent of the requests is completely different: the first is informational and the second is commercial. To avoid duplicates, you should first check the site for duplicate titles, and if there are duplicates, correct the meta tags.
How to find duplicate address?
Select “Duplicate page titles” on the right and get a list of pages on which meta tags are copied. If the pages have different content and the same title tags, you need to adjust the meta tags. If the pages are identical in terms of tags and content, you should delete one page and set up a 301 redirect from the address of the remote page to the current page.
This helps if links to deleted pages are hosted on other sites or in the index. Here a 301 redirect is needed so that users do not go to a remote control, but to the desired page. But on the site itself, these links must be removed. Therefore, we recommend that you immediately check if the site contains links to the remote page (see instructions above) and replace them with the current page.
Analysis of h1 headers Each page should contain a main heading in tags, which are as detailed as possible and at the same time succinctly reflect the content of the page. This allows the search engine to more accurately determine the type of information published on the page. When performing an SEO audit, you need to check whether the headline is present on all pages of the site.
In addition, only one main heading should be marked with tags. How can I find pages where the h1 main title is missing? It is necessary to select the “H1” tab.
You will see a list of pages where the h1 heading is missing. This address must be added to all pages of the site. In the same block on the right, in the “Multiple” tab, there will be pages with multiple h1 headers.
In this case, you need to remove the second title if it repeats the first title, or if it is not needed, or mark the title with tags Read also: How to properly test SEO for beginners A comprehensive file according to its hierarchy. We also recommend checking the Duplicate tab for duplicate h1 headers. In general, h1 doubles are not a problem.
However, if there are a large number of duplicates, we recommend modifying the titles, especially on product/service/article pages and in cases where the site is configured to automatically generate meta tags. This step is very important to perform a technical SEO audit. Checking canonical presence and validity To avoid duplicate pages, it is recommended to set the canonical attribute on all pages that point to the canonical (home) page. The rel=canonical attribute of the tag tells search engines that some pages may be similar even though the URLs are different (for example, pagination pages).
The presence of this attribute is not a ranking factor, but in some cases it can have a positive impact on site indexing and avoiding duplicate pages, for example, when GET parameters (ad tags, sorting, etc.) are added to the URL. In order to check which pages this attribute is placed on and whether the links are correct, you need to select the “Canonical” tab on the left. In the “Missing” tab you can see a list of pages where this attribute is not present.
In this article, we explained to you how to conduct a technical audit for search engine optimization. We hope you like it. #Conduct a technical audit #SEO
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