Technical SEO Checker

Technical SEO cheat sheet

Meta robots allowed

The meta robots tag is something that can be extremely harmful to your website’s SEO if implemented without reasoning. As it has the capability to tell search engines not to index a specific page.

Our SEO plugin checks for a noindex tag throughout the full page, in order to check if this tag is present or not.

Meta title

Meta title is also known as the <title> tag.

This is one of the most important tags for SEO, as it’s where you can have a good opportunity to tell search engines such as Google, what your keywords actually are.

Meta description

The meta description is actually not a direct ranking factor in Google, however, it has the ability to increase CTR.

Meaning, you should try to be as quick and informative as possible here. Not so much by spamming it with keywords, however, giving as much information on why your page is the best result for the user to click on.

One H1 tag

Heading tags have a hierarchy from 1–6, with 1 being most powerful.

Again, this is a really good opportunity to tell Google what your page’s main keyword/phrase is going to be.

For this, it’s important that you only stick to one heading tag, as any more could potentially confuse Google on what you’re trying to optimise for.

H2 tag

H2 tags are a great opportunity for you to start implementing related keywords into.

For example, if we’re talking about the topic of SEO, we could be talking about the topic of SEO audits too.

Generally, less than 5-H2 tags are enough. However, if your page is more demanding and has a lot of content, you could look into including more if necessary.

Alt text

Alt text is the text which tells search engines and screen-readers what an image is about.

From an SEO point of view, it’s an opportunity to tell Google that your website is accessible from a user-experience point-of-view, whilst also allowing you to filter in some more keywords if appropriate too.

Responsive design

If your website isn’t responsive, it’s likely it’s outdated and requires a new theme or redesign.

Our plugin checks to see if your website uses a viewport, as having a responsive website is likely better from a user-experience point-of-view, than having a seperate mobile optimised one.

No inline CSS

Your website’s pages shouldn’t be using inline CSS, as all website styles should be compiled into one or more CSS file.

Our plugin checks to see if you’ve used the style attribute anywhere, in order to see if you’re using any inline CSS styles.

Google Analytics

Our plugin tests to see if you’re using Google Analytics on your page, by looking for a tag starting with UA-, followed by a number.

Whilst, Google says that they don’t use data from Google Analytics, it’s a controversial enough topic to include this into our SEO check.

Favicon

Favicon relates back to the accessibility. Especially for those who wish to save links to their smartphones.

In terms of other SEO benefits, it may just help increase your website’s CTA and therefore traffic too.

As in Google Chrome, the favicon is shown when users start to type a website’s URL into the main search bar — allowing it to become a bit more eye-catching.

SSL check

Google has confirmed that having an SSL on your website is, in fact, a ranking factor.

Whilst this check is site-wide, it’s often overlooked as it involves additional costs which mightn’t be feasible.

However, certificates issued from organisations such as Let’s Encrypt often come free with most hosting providers. Meaning, it might be worth asking your hosting provider about this.

HTTPS redirect

Commonly overlooked, developers often forget to check if the HTTP version redirects to the HTTPS version of a website accordingly.

Our SEO checker can check this by comparing the server’s response status from both URLs.

If you’re having this problem and are looking to fix it, you’re going to want to read this guide on migrating to HTTPS.

WWW redirect

Another commonly overlooked SEO check by developers is checking if the WWW and non-WWW versions of your website redirect to a single version accordingly.

In the event that they don’t, you may still be safe from an SEO point-of-view, if your canonical tag is pointing to the correct version.

One article tag

Article tags may help with accessibility for screen-readers, as it tells browsers where the page’s main readable content is located.

It might not be important for every page, however, we’d highly recommended it for blog posts, where content is longer and screen-readers are more likely to be used.

Schema markup

Schema markup allows you to insert rich metadata onto your website. Helping you to provide more information to search engines about the particular purpose of different sections located around a page.

Secure links

As part of our plugin, the SEO check crawls all links on a page, in order to see there are any links beginning with http://. As these could potentially be insecure for users when clicked on.

Broken links

Another great future of our plugin is the ability to check on-page broken links, which result in a 404-page-not-found result when clicked on.

Fixing these is going to help your SEO from an accessibility point-of-view, as you’re not misinforming your website’s users in any way.

Redirected links

Similar to how our broken links check works, by using this plugin you’re able to check if links have been 301 or 302-redirected.

Giving you a heads-up to check all the links on a page for possible redirections, so that you can amend your content accordingly.