1. Website Analysis
Website analysis is a process under On-Page Optimization used to analyze an entire website to determine how well it is performing on a search engine.
Purpose: Professionals use it to find the website’s weaknesses and status to set an SEO strategy. It helps focus on weaker areas that hinder optimum profit and success.
2. Website Structure
General pattern: Most websites follow a pattern with a homepage that links off to different categories and other content.
- Homepage: The primary page of the website, often functioning as a hub from which all other pages are accessible.
- Parent page: An internal web page that links to a variety of different pages in an organized pattern, such as a particular group of subjects.
- Content: Pages are usually made up of text and other forms of media.
Example in this site: the Homepage links to About, Skills, Projects, and Contact.
3. Meta Tags
Meta tags are snippets of code placed in the <head> section of an HTML document. They inform search engines how to display the page in search results and tell web browsers how to display it to visitors.
Six key meta tags to improve site optimization
- Title tag: The page’s title that appears in search results and offers a preview of the content. It should be clear, descriptive, usually not more than 55 characters, and can include a keyword while adding value.
- Meta description: The snippet that displays underneath the title tag in search results. It should accurately describe the content and often determines if users click on your page.
- Robots meta tag: Informs search engines which pages to index or not index. The default is to index and follow if no tag is added. It can be used to prevent indexing of thin-content pages.
- Alt text: Provides a text alternative for images, ensuring accessibility for screen readers and telling search engines what the image represents. Keywords can be included, but keyword stuffing should be avoided.
- Canonical tag: Used for pages on your site that are almost identical or have syndicated content, guiding crawlers on which URL is the “main” one to prevent duplicate content penalties and SEO cannibalization.
- Header tag (h1, h2, h3, etc.): Headings used to structure your page content, which improves user experience and helps search engines understand the content.
Header tags: The h1 tag typically denotes the page title or article headline, while h2 and below serve as subheadings. It is usually suggested to use only one <h1> tag.
Example (invisible meta tags)
<title>Page Title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Short summary of the page." />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page" />
4. Hyperlinks Optimization
A hyperlink is a clickable object on a webpage that leads from one page to another.
- Internal links: Links between pages within the same website/domain.
- Inbound links: Links that come from other websites or different domain names to your site.
- Outbound links: Links on your website that link out to websites with a different domain name.
Tip: for outbound links, it’s best practice to use target="_blank" with rel="noopener noreferrer" for security.
5. Broken Links Checking
Broken links are links that no longer exist and trigger a 404 error page.
- Internal broken links: You have the most control over these and should check them whenever you update or make changes to your website.
- External broken links (outbound links): You are not in control of these, so they need to be checked more often (at least once a month for small sites, once a week for large sites). Too many 404 error pages will decrease your website’s value from the search engines’ perspective and may result in a lower rank.
6. Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, which search engines read to crawl your site more efficiently.
Purpose: Tells Google which pages are important and provides valuable information, such as the last update time and alternate language versions.
When you might need one (for Google)
- If your site is large (more likely to overlook new pages).
- If your site has a large archive of isolated or poorly linked content.
- If your site is new with few external links.
- If your site has a lot of rich media (video, images) or is shown in Google News.