When it comes to SEO it’s important to remember that the search engines look at all aspects of your website when determining rank. A website may look beautiful and be easy to navigate, which is important from a user perspective, but what’s going on on the outside of the site doesn’t always accurately reflect what’s going on on the back end of the site which is really what the search engine spiders are seeing. If you’ve incurred a penalty, you will obviously need to conduct a technical SEO audit to figure out what went wrong but it’s recommended to conduct an audit on a regular basis to try and prevent a penalty from happening in the first place.
Here are 4 important technical SEO items to be aware of:
Duplicate content:
If
you have duplicate content on your site (different URLs that have
basically the same content on each page) it appears to the search
engines that you are trying to dominate the search results by creating
multiple pages that include the same keywords. Most of the time, site
owners don’t even realize that this duplication is happening since it’s
something that originates from how the site was set up during the web
development process. It doesn’t affect the usability of the site and
visitors probably don’t even notice it, but the search spiders do. A
common occurrence is when the homepage is duplicated unknowingly. Some
websites have the homepage.com version, a hompage.com/index version, and
a homepage.com/default version. In addition to creating a duplicate
content issue, this can also hurt SEO
because it is splitting the links to the site. If a duplicate content
issue is found, be sure to redirect to one of the pages so that some of
the link trust can be preserved.
Broken links:
Broken
links are bad from a search engine perspective and a user perspective.
If a search engine spider lands on a broken link, it’s like a dead
end. This conveys to the search engine spider that your site doesn’t
have good usability. When conducting a technical SEO audit, generate a list of all of the broken links and implement 301 redirects to existing pages that are related.
Inbound links:
The
Penguin update targeted sites that had “unnatural” link portfolios.
Over time your site will build links naturally and it’s important to be
aware of what kinds of sites are linking over to you. If you find any
links that you don’t want associated with your site, you can request
that they be removed.
Anchor text:
It’s
important to be aware of what kind of anchor text is being used to
link to your site. If you run a report and find that the majority of
your anchor text links are associated with one or two of your important
keywords, this could be a red flag to the search engines. It could
appear as if you are trying to manipulate the results for those
keywords. An anchor text link portfolio should be natural and include
branded keywords and long tail variations.
