SEO Technical Elements Optimization – Technical Audit Checklist for Website Search Engine Optimization

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10 years ago
In Learn SEO Marketing
What is SEO – search engine optimization?

Search engines are always taking major responsible in providing the quality and relevant search results with in-depth process information. To provide the user search query results, search engines are always examine the every website to crawl and index also to rank to a search keyword. If the search engines are poorly implemented the technical rudiments then the search engine robots (crawlers)are  can’t crawl websites and will not index. This will impact the website rank in search result pages.
Search engines use sophisticated and own algorithms in order to define each website ranking for a visitor search query typed for retrieving organic search results. Robots or wonderers or spiders are collecting the latest web content update information through crawl – index process from the webpages. The collected information is tested against various numbers of algorithms to check the qualityness and educativeness etc.
The websites those tolerated in the algorithms test are included in their database system depending on web page popularity, website score etc. are used to arrange in search results pages for relevant search terms through the automated process. The process of achieving web site ranking for targeted keywords on the search engines results pages is called “search engine optimization,” abbreviated as SEO normally.
Technical SEO – search engine optimization

Technical Search Engine Optimization is deals with the technical parameters optimization those exist at the source code and on the website. These technical seo issues can impact your entire SEO optimization and marketing, visitor engagement strategy. Detecting and fixing the website technical element issues is called “Technical SEO optimization”. This will help you in improving the quick indexing and SERP rankings. This is also required to protect your website from a number of algorithm updates.
Technical SEO audit is considered to prepare in-depth analysis report after analyzing the technical parameters of website and pages. This technical seo audit report will recommends you to improve the good user experience of your website. Good user experience website always achieves top natural rank position in the focused search engines and it can support you in gaining other fruitful SEO results depending on Algorithm changes.
This technical SEO audit is designed to analyze the structural and content elements of the website. It will help us to make decision about to drive fruitful long term SEO results in addition to existing effective SEO optimizing and marketing strategy according to the latest search engine algorithm changes.
SEO technical audits report consists of variety of suggestions and solutions to yield several key benefits to improve the SEO ROI results from natural and referral searches. Generally the SEO audit report is with deep analysis of each technical parameters those are critically important to optimize them.
During a technical SEO audit, SEO analysts or SEO managers will look for the following technical elements:
Canonicalization – Check the www and non-www URLs redirection to make them search engine friendly
Best Practice – Having several URLs for the same web page is a serious issue at search engines. 
  • Avoid this canonicalization issue to improve the link authority.
  • Add link rel=”canonical” tag to avoid the content duplication
  • Use a permanent redirection “301 redirect”

Useful online tool to check website url canonicalization – 

404 Not Found Errors – Check how many web pages are leading to 404 Page Not Found error and improper 301 redirects.


Best Practice – 
  • Check manually or with the help of online tools to find out broken links, dead links and pages leading to 404 errors.
  • Test your URL redirection is permanent (301 redirection) or temporary (302 redirection)

Useful online tool to check website 404 Page Not Found error –

HTML improvements


Meta Title tags and descriptions – Meta title is a HTML code that shows the page titling words that appears in the Title bar at the top of your web browser like Chrome, Mozilla, Safari etc.

Meta description is a HTML code that displayed in the search results page with optimized words in the search engines like Chrome, Mozilla, Safari etc.

Best Practice –

Useful online tool to check website Meta Title and description tags –

  • http://www.exadium.com/tools/metadata/
  • Check your webmaster tool account to find the non-search engine friendly HTML tags such as Titles, description etc…

Web Page load time analysis – Test your pages and website loading speed at bath cases 1) server connectivity – site loading and 2) webpage loading at your browsers


Best Practice – 
  • Keep your site loading at less than 6 seconds for ecommerce sites and upto 10 seconds for general content sites

Useful online tool to check website pages loading speed –

Link quality (for backlinks) – Check all your backlinks or inbound links’ quality and authority to secure your website or blog and to avoid your search engine ranking and traffic penalty.


Best Practice – Plan careful and quality backlink building with relevant niche sites, authority websites

Useful online tool to check backlink qualityness – 
Bad neighborhood links identification – Examine all yours inbound or backlink text links to determine the sites those violating Search engines guidelines.

Best Practice – 

  • Scan your backlink sources with manual check or online tools
  • Use Google search operator in search box to find relevant sites linking search engine friendly – related:www.yourwebsite.com
Useful online tool to check backlink profile –
Internal external duplicate content – Examine your content in title tag, description tag, H1, H2 and internal webpage’s content, external online content also internal linking structures etc.

Best Practice – 

  • Scan your webpages with manual check or online tools
Useful online tool to check internal external duplicate content –
Search engine crawling and indexing issues – Check all pages crawled and indexed at search engines on regular basis after content update.

Best Practice – 

  • Check your site functionality, links, and textual links, URL parameters, Server Issues, code errors, .htaccess file with manual or online tools;
  • Add fresh content frequently; 
  • Use Fetch as Google option in webmaster tool; 
  • Use meta ‘robots’ tag in head section of code; 
  • Create and submit sitemap (XML or HTML); 
  • Test all page URLs redirecting to 404 Page Not Found Error
Useful online tool to find crawling and indexing issues –
Server connectivity status – search engines can’t access your website when your server is too slow to respond or when is blocking crawlers at the time of server connectivity such as Connect timeout, Connect failed, Connection refused, No response, Truncated response, Connection reset, Truncated headers, Timeout etc. situations…

Best Practice – 

  • Reduce excessive page loading time, 
  • Avoid DNS configuration issue, 
  • Monitor the website’s crawling and indexing with robots.txt and sitemap files
Useful online tool to test your server connection –
Server downtime – Server function is indicated by uptime and downtime. The server status can impact the website performance and visibility on online. Search engines will drop your web pages from the index, when search engines crawlers, bots tries to access your website.

Best Practice – 

  • Look at your server statistics and apache uptime (Apache Status), 
  • Test your robot.txt file,

Useful online tool to test your Server downtime –

Trustworthiness – Examine the every website before visiting on online to stay free from virus, malware, and trojans, phishing etc. for Safe Browsing Diagnostic over the internet.

Best Practice – 

  • Test the pages for trust seal from popular Authentication Service Providers like McAfee Secure, Norton etc. before paying bills online.
  • Find the contact details, design, site functionality, page content, social proofs, SSL certification, Activity in social networks.
Useful online tool to test your website Trustworthiness –
Brand Search – Brand is a credibility or popularity of a company. High web presence is represents the brand popularity. Build brand for your services or products or business. Brand reputation is an intangible characteristic feature of a company that can generate long term revenue.  

Best Practice – 

  • Be more social, begin email marketing, and improve your website online visibility.
Useful online tool to test your website Brand Search –
Code to Text Ratio – It is the ratio or percentage of actual text in a webpage. The Code to Text ratio is used to calculate the webpage text and HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. code. A good text to HTML ratio is somewhere from 25 to 70 percent.

Best Practice – 

  • Create a Page with a high text and low HTML ratio; 
  • Focus more on user-experience with quality online content.

Useful online tool to test your website HTML Code to Text Ratio –

Safe Browsing Status – Examine your site whether it is safe to Internet browsing and free from unwanted online threats and programs. It is a one of the main Website Reputation parameter on online.

Best Practice – 

  • Update your browsers to protect from web security vulnerabilities, adjust the security setting carefully, and beware of doubtful or suspicious download files. Prefer Safe Browsing of your website pages. 
  • Learn secure computer user tips.

Useful online tool to test your site Safe Online Browsing Status –

Trust Links – Search engines doesn’t penalize sites that they trust.

Best Practice – 

  • Improve the trust of your website. Improve your website on-page elements optimization. 
  • Optimize your about us or me page, contact us, privacy policy, terms and conditions pages etc. 
  • Get backlinks or inbound links from Google product domains (News etc.), .govs, .edus, DMOZ, Wikipedia and other authorized also high pagerank relevant niche web sites.

Useful online free tool to test your website trust –

Broken Links – Broken links are non-exists urls of your site pages. They will impact directly the visitor engagement, brand, revenue etc…

Best Practice – 

  • Test your site pages regularly to find out broken inner pages manually or with best online free seo tools.
Useful online tool to check broken links on your site –
Website organic index analysis –

Google stores the crawled website information in its two databases. One of them is Main index and second is Supplemental index. The main index data or pages information is with of page authority, domain authority factors, content quality and high visitor value. These information is exists in search result pages when searcher types a query in search box. The supplement index data and URLs will not appears in main index as they lack of content quality, page authority, lack of visitor informative, high bouncerate, full of popup ads etc… This will impact directly your site seo performance and business revenues, ROI etc…

Best Practice – 

  • Test your site pages periodically with manual check and online index checker tools, Build good internal link architecture, 
  • Create link bait content, 
  • Develop online visitor education content 
  • Avoid crawling indexing barriers.

Useful online tool to check index of your site pages index –

  • Use site:www.yourwebsite.com in the search box and see how many URL results indexed at below the search box and Check pagination at bottom  (1  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10) 
  • Until you see real main indexed pages number along with a message “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the (your site pages number here) already displayed.
  • If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included”.   
  • Then click on this message link highlighted in Blue colour. Then you can see few more your web pages indexed at search engine database system.
Latest date of Googlebot crawling –

Googlebot is a web crawler that crawl every site on periodical basis to determine new content and web pages to add to its index system. Finding out when Google is crawled last time will help you to improve yours website overall performance.

Best Practice – 

  • There are a number of ways exists to manage the Google crawling pattern. 
  • Check your web server connectivity, site loading time, robots.txt file and sitemap’s URL priority option, freshness of content, visitor numbers, robots meta tag for follow and index, update sitemap submission etc…
Useful online tool to check Last date of Googlebot crawling – 
Site architecture – It is one of the major parameter that effecting your site and content performance directly and indirectly. Your site authority depends on this factor. Website navigation functionality requires user friendly and search engine friendly Information Architecture design and site development for good user experience. Site architecture is defined as heart of a website.

Best Practice – 

  • Check website crawlability, indexing pattern, click depth of each inner pages, lay-out practice etc. 
  • Avoid complex hierarchical site structure. 
  • Reduce the number of clicks (click depth of inner pages).
  • Develop a good information architecture and usability to improve your business revenue with long term online conversions
Useful online tool to check website navigation and information architecture –
URL formats – URL is abbreviation for Universal Resource Locator. It is a link address of your landing pages. Each your webpage is having unique URL structure. Basically URLs are static and dynamic in nature.  Dynamic urls will generate duplicate URLs. WordPress sites, ecommerce sites, industrial websites and others are general having these dynamic URLs.

Best Practice – 

  • Static URLs are most online user or visitor friendly in nature and easy to understand and readable, clickable. 
  • Dynamic URLs are consists of variable strings and id when the web pages are scripted with dynamic scripts such as PHP or JavaScript etc.
Useful online tool to check website pages URLs –
  • Ask your developer or designer to change from dynamic to static a user friendly.
  • Use URL rewriter tool
  • Use robots.txt file to avoid search engine penalties for having duplicate URLs. 
Sitemaps – Sitemaps are the site page has all created web pages links. These are the first studied by search engines crawlers or spiders. There are two types of sitemaps are exists. They are HTML sitemap; XML sitemap. In addition to them, image sitemap, video sitemap etc.

Best Practice – 

  • Most of the webmasters and seo analysts are prepare and to add sitemap option existing in Google Webmaster tool account.
  • On regular basis, create all possible types of sitemap files and add to search engines to tell about your site content updates.
  • Remove the rewritten urls and non-existing urls from the sitemap files.
Useful online tool to check website sitemap –
Pagination – The process of making content showing a limited number of posts at bottom of the page. Pagination can be seen at server side or client side. Server-side pagination enables the quick loading of webpages.

Best Practice – 

  • Website Structure and hierarchy will reduce complexity and improve the content readability.  Effective pagination design will help you in efficient crawling of your site or blog.
  • Use additional navigation options such as “previous” and “next” links
  • Offer large clickable areas
  • Don’t practice underlines for linked pages
  • Use breadcrumbs for better site navigation for users
  • Provide first and last pages links (wherever applicable)
Learn more on best seo Pagination practice at – 

Breadcrumbs – It is one of the important navigational elements on webpage. The primary navigational structure is Menu bar and secondary is breadcrumb structure.
It seems like Home page > Category page > Product page at below the banner image or header area.

Best Practice – 

  • Website breadcrumb structures are increases the findability of website pages. These tell to visitors where is he landed.
  • These helps in preparing website’s navigation architecture
  • Reduces clicks depth for deeper pages
  • Reduces overall bounce rates
  • Highlights the targeted important keywords those navigates to inner pages
  • Boost the higher CTR from user when seen within the natural search results
  • Help as visitors’ navigational links those showing the website structure and hierarchy of pages.
Useful online tool to check website breadcrumb structure –
Rich snippets – Rich snippets are microdata — HTML coded bits of web page content information is with additional details about your web page. There are 3 different types of rich snippets that will be displayed in search results. They are, 1) Video 2 ) Images 3) Textual information.

Best Practice – 

  • There are a lot of seo benefits for Rich snippets usage.
  • Improves the site rankings in SERP search results by adding significant value to your web pages organic listing
  • Improves click-through rates from search results
  • Brings more qualified web traffic and better conversion rates 
  • Improves the product or services online visibility
Useful online tool to add Rich snippets structure –
Authorship – Author snippets is used display the author’s name, Google+ profile picture (Currently, author images are not shown in SERP results) number of followers and link etc. are in the search result pages (SERP) with organic listing.

Best Practice – 

  • Set up your Google+ profile, it is a prerequisite for Authorship markup used to display in SERP pages.
  • From your web site, add link to yours Google+ profile with rel=”author” tag.
Useful online tool to Check Author Rich snippets markup structure –
Search engine penalty diagnosis – Websites are online platforms used to visible over the internet. The sites are uses many kinds of promotional and marketing strategies to improve the visibility than others. There few kinds of site promotion methods highly prone to search engine penalties or filters.

Best Practice –

  • Check your site safe for browsing
  • Examine all your backlink profile, “bad neighborhood” sites
  • Check Google’s index with search query: “site:yourdomain.com.
  • Add Nofollow tags for external links
  • Plan quality backlink building strategy carefully
  • Check yours organic search traffic volume
Useful online tool to Check Search engine penalty diagnosis –
IP Detection – If a IP address is involves in violation of search engine & webmaster guidelines with malware spread incidents and web spamming activities or any suspicious activities; Most of the search engines are blacklisted that ip number.


Best Practice –
  • Use anti-virus software and run periodically
  • Get a unique dedicated ip address instead of shared IP

Useful online tool to check your site IP address – 

Search functionality – It provides a way to find your deeper content. The website search functionality allows the online visitors to navigate into desired inner landing pages. 

Best Practice –
  • Activate the search for better internal site navigation
  • Add a Google Custom Search box to your homepage 
  • Set up a search feature with https://www.google.com/cse/
Useful online tool to check your site search function –
Code validation – HTML, CSS

HTML, CSS, XML etc. codes are used in development of website. The site authority and architecture, functionality, good user experiences are depends on this codes using to develop the website.

Best Practice – 

  • Check the source code manually or with online tools to find out the code errors.
  • Fix the existing code errors to improve the website search engine crawling process.
  • Minimize your programming errors to improve the web access and cross-browser feature
Useful online tool to test your website Code validation –
Learn how to optimize website technically
Here is a list of few references those help you in technical seo analysis, website technical elements optimization, improving website ranking with technical correction, popular technical seo tools and website’s technical issues, how to fixing the site problems in order to improve the website search rank at top SERP position, conversion optimization, and business leads sales, revenue generation, auditing the website to improve the performance at search engines. 
Learn website technical seo audit and search engine optimization
  • http://fortheloveofseo.com/seo-services/technical-seo-audit-service/technical-seo-audit-checklist/
  • http://www.linchpinseo.com/seo-audit
  • http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/technical-seo-audit-checklist.htm
  • http://www.joomlajunkie.com/company/services/technical-seo-audit.html
  • http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/technical-seo/
  • http://www.bruceclay.com/in/seo-tech-tips/techtips.htm
  • http://www.stateofsearch.com/11-technical-seo-tools-you-should-be-using/
  • http://raventools.com/blog/ultimate-list-of-conversion-optimization-tools/
  • http://blog.emarketingnext.com/comprehensive-technical-seo-site-audit-95/
  • http://www.sandiegowebstudio.com/server-directory-cleanup.html
  • http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/technical-seo-audit-checklist.htm
  • http://www.joomlajunkie.com/company/services/technical-seo-audit.html
  • http://www.mg3webworks.com/marketing/websiteseo-audit/
  • http://www.searchenginechocolate.com/
  • http://www.newbizblogger.com/wordpress/troubleshooting-website-technical-issues
  • http://www.hostmiles.com/common-technical-issues-with-a-website.htm
  • http://www.mash-marketing.com/seo-category/technical-seo-audit-website/
  • http://www.linchpinseo.com/seo-audit
  • http://www.seovalley.com/blog/technical-audit-a-must-step-to-rise-in-the-serp.html
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