2. Tools we’ll use
• Google Search
• Google Webmaster Tools (aka Search Console)
• Chrome Developer Tools
• Why No Padlock
• Moz Local Search Tool
3. How does Google work?
When Google crawls a site it checks:
• Robots.txt
• Sitemap.xml
• Source code of each page it crawls
• Meta tags in the source code
• Content of each page crawled
4. SEO Meta Tags
• The title tag
<title></title>
• The meta description
<meta name="description" content="" />
5. Additional SEO Meta Tags
• NOINDEX
NOFOLLOW
• NOODP
• NOYDIR
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
6. Google doesn’t use my...
• #1 most frequently asked question in SEO:
Why doesn’t Google use my title or description?
7. Google Quality Guidelines
• Every page must have a title and description
• Every title and description must be unique
• Titles should be less than 60 characters
• Descriptions should be less than 160 characters
• Brand your titles
• Titles and descriptions should be descriptive,
no keyword stuffing
• Use NOODP and NOYDIR
• Fix problems as soon as they occur
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en
11. Headings – H1, H2, H3
• Headings are important to visitors and Google
• H1 headings should be for the page/post title only
• There should only be one H1 heading on any page
• H2 headings are for primary headings in content
• H3 headings are for secondary headings in content
• Never mix and match
• Fix bad headings in theme template files
12. Blocked Resources
You can block Google using:
• Robots.txt
• NOINDEX meta tag
• .htaccess
• Search Engine Visibility setting in WordPress
(Settings > Reading)
• Using some plugins
16. Crawl Errors - Causes
Common causes of Crawl Errors:
• Incorrect URL due to change in permalink
Examples:
• Change to the permalink structure in WordPress
• Change to page structure or category structure
i.e. move a top level page to a child page
/wordpress-seo/ to /services/wordpress-seo/
• Change to page slug,
i.e. rename a slug from /contact/ to /contact-us/
17. Crawl Errors - Causes
Common causes of Crawl Errors:
• Incorrect URL due to bad hyperlink on your site
Examples:
• you typed a URL wrong
• you created a link to a page then deleted that page
so the link goes nowhere
18. Crawl Errors - Causes
Common causes of Crawl Errors:
• Incorrect URL used in a backlink to your site
Examples:
• Someone mistyped the URL when linking to your site
• Someone linked to a page that no longer exists
19. Crawl Errors - Causes
Common causes of Crawl Errors:
• Server issues
• DNS issues
• Plugin or theme issues
32. Structured Data – Schema
markup
What is Structured Data / Schema markup?
• Structured data is a type of markup that Google uses
to display rich snippets and Knowledge Graph cards
in search results
Examples of rich snippets include:
• Product price and availability information
• Star ratings
• Recipe information
• Event information
33. Structured Data – Schema
markup
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data
40. Local SEO Issues
• Name, Address and Phone (NAP) markup
• Missing or incomplete Google Business listing
• Missing, incomplete or conflicting business listings,
directory listings, social media information and review sites
In this session we’re going to cover how to identify and troubleshoot common problems with SEO
We’re going to use a selection of tools which you will all want to become familiar with
These include essential tools such as Google Search and Google Webmaster Tools as well as problem specific tools such as Chrome Developer Tools, Why No Padlock and Moz Local Search Tool
I’ll show you how to use these tools to identify problems so you can then fix them on your sites
So first let’s quickly go over how Google works
Google crawls websites looking for specific information as well as indexing the content on the website
The first file that Google checks when it crawls a site is the robots.txt file
This is a file that is either dynamically generated by WordPress or a plugin or it could be a static file in the filesystem on your web server
It tells crawlers and robots where they cannot go
It also tells them where they can find your XML Sitemap
It’s important because if it is misconfigured then you could block search engines from seeing important files on your site or even block them totally from your site
The XML Sitemap is typically a dynamically generated map of your site that lists all of the URLs for your content and when each page was last changed and how often your content changes
Search engines use this file to help them determine which content needs to be indexed since their last visit and how often they should visit your site
Search engines then check the source code of pages they crawl to look for meta information
They may or may not use this information depending on their preferences
Finally they look at your content and index this content so that people using their search engine can find your content
So when Google looks at a page of content on your site, it checks for various meta tags
The two most important are the title tag and the meta description
The title tag should be an accurate and concise title for the page
It is a critical element in SEO and every page of content on your site should have a title tag, this includes posts, products, custom post types, archives, etc.
The meta description should be an accurate and concise description of the content of your page
It is also a critical element on SEO, and although they are not as important in rankings they are important for influencing someone to click on your result in search results
Both the title tag and meta description are used search results to create the snippet that you see in the image above
In addition to the title and description meta tags, there are a number of other meta tags search engines check for
These include robots meta tags which give direction to the search engine crawlers
Noindex is by far the most important of these
Noindex asks or tells search engines not to index this page of content
This is important if you’re wondering why your content doesn’t appear when you search for it
Nofollow tells search crawlers not to follow any links on that page
This effectively makes the page a standalone and could mean search engines don’t crawl and index content linked from that page, especially bad if this is on your homepage
NOODP and NOYDIR will be discussed next
The most frequently asked question I get, and I get asked this every week, is why isn’t Google showing my title or description in search results
So let’s look at why this happens and how we can troubleshoot this
Google has specific quality guidelines which cover title tags and meta descriptions
If you don’t follow these guidelines then you reduce the chance of Google using your title and description
Even if you follow these to the letter you should understand that Google does not have to use your title tag or meta description in a search snippet
The generation of search snippets is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web
The goal of the snippet is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to the user's search
Another thing to be aware of when you’re troubleshooting why your title or description isn’t appearing in SERPS is that Google may not have crawled that page since you set or changed the the title or description
To check this we can perform a site search in Google
We do this by typing site colon in front of our domain name
We can then click on Search Tools to reveal an extra filter menu
Selecting Past Year will restrict results to anything indexed in the last year
And sorting by date will show latest indexed pages first
Here we can see that Google last indexed our blog 5 days ago
So if I had made a change to the title or description on my blog page more recently than that well the new title and description would not have been picked up by Google yet so I’d have to wait until they next update their index for my blog page
A final note about the date that appears in Google search results
A lot of people ask whether you can remove that date, the answer is no
Google will pick up that date and display it because they want to and there’s no way to force them to remove them
Troubleshooting title tag and meta description issues is helped by using Google Webmaster Tools
If you go to Search Appearance, HTML Improvements you will see a report showing any issues Google has found with your titles and descriptions
You can then resolve these issues
However, this report does not update very often and so new issues don’t show for a while and resolved issues have a habit of remaining in the report for a while after you have fixed them
It’s strongly recommended that you check this report every couple of weeks but you should really get in the good practice of writing good titles and descriptions that comply with Google’s quality guidelines
Our All in One SEO Pack plugin is a great tool for managing titles
It helps you by showing you which pages don’t have titles and descriptions
It shows when a title or description exceeds the character limits
It brands your titles for you
It has checkboxes to enable NOODP and NOYDIT site wide
So all you need to do is focus on writing accurate and concise titles and descriptions
Here are some useful links to help you with troubleshooting title and description issues
When you look at a web page, news article, blog post or any other content you expect to see a title at the top that tells you what the page is about
This title is exceptionally important to us as consumers of content
As we read content we like to see long content broken up into sections with clear titles
We like to see structure to content and structure to titles with titles and sub titles
Well it’s the same for search engines
They pay attention to our use of titles
In WordPress these are the H1 through to H6 headings we can select from the button bar above the content editor
But there are rules to how we use these
The most important of these rules is that every page should have a page title
That title is the H1 heading
There should only be one page title for any page of content and therefore there should only be one H1 heading on any page
Headings in content should use H2 headings for primary headings and H3 headings for secondary headings
We should never mess with this hierarchical structure
The biggest problems I see with headings is with themes that do not correctly implement H1 headings for page titles
Always check your page source for problems and fix any bad headings in your theme
One of the worst problems we run into is that search engines cannot or have not index content because they are blocked
There are many ways you can block a search engine from indexing your content
These include:
Using the robots.txt file
Using the NOINDEX meta tag
Using a directive in your htaccess file
Using the Search Engine Visibility setting in WordPress
Or by using some plugins
This is my recommendation for a WordPress robots.txt file
It shows the URL for the XML sitemap
It have two disallow statements
The first blocks crawlers and robots from going in the cgi-bin directory
This is system directory found on many servers and there’s no reason for search engines to go in there
The second is for the xmlrpc file
I block search engines from that file because they have no reason to index that file
Note that I do not block them from any of the WordPress directories
This is in line with a statement put out by Google back in July 2015 where they needed access to core JavaScript files so they could index some site content
We can check for blocked resources in Google Webmaster Tool under Google Index, Blocked Resources
We can also test our robots.txt file under Crawl, Robots.txt Tester
And we can also perform a Fetch and Render under Crawl, Fetch as Google
All on these tools will help you to identify if Google is blocked from content, files or scripts on your site that it needs in order to render and read your content
You should become familiar with each of these tools
The Crawl Errors report can be accessed in Google Webmaster Tools by going to Crawl > Crawl Errors
This report will show a list of URLs which Google crawled in the past but received an error when they last tried to crawl that page
The report shows the URL, the HTML Error Code they received and the date they crawled the page and got the error
Crawl errors happen for several reasons. These include:
You changed the permalink structure on your site without setting up redirection
Doing this could affect the URL structure of your site which means that Google would get a 404 page not found error when trying to crawl your site on the old URL structure
Or it could be that you changed the permalink for a specific post or page
For example, you changed the page structure by moving a top level page to become a child page
This changes the permalink for that page resulting in a 404 page not found error when trying to crawl the page on the old URL
Or that you changed category structure which could affect the URLs for posts
Another example would be you changed the slug for a page
For example you changed /contact to /contact-us
If Google indexed that page with the URL /contact and tries to visit that URL now it would get a 404 page not found
Another cause is that you have broken links in the content of your site
For example, you typed a URL incorrectly
Or you linked to a page or post and then deleted that page or post and so now the link is broken
Another cause is that you have broken back links to content on your site from other peoples sites
For example, they typed the URL for your site incorrectly
Or they linked to a page or post that has since been removed and so now the link is broken
Other causes can include server issues, DNS issues and plugin or theme issues
Typically these issues will result in a different error code than 404 page not found
For example, if the site is unreachable due to a server or DNS outage then the error code would indicate this
To troubleshoot a crawl error we first need to know the cause of the error
We can determine this by clicking on each error in the table
This will launch a popup that shows the error details and source
The first tab shows the error details
This is a blog post that is resulting in a page not found 404 error
We can see the date that Google reported the problem
If the sitemaps tab shows then this would indicate that the URL was found in the XML Sitemap
This is rare if you use a plugin such as All in One SEO Pack which dynamically generates the XML Sitemap whenever it is requested
A dynamically generated sitemap is created based on the state of your site at that second and it lists all the URLs for your content as they are at that second
This means they are typically extremely accurate
The Linked From tab will show where Google found the link that is resulting in the 404 error
In this example the bad link to my post appears on multiple pages on my site
This tab would show if the link is a backlink found on someone elses site
It would list all the URLs of those external sites that are back linking to your post
The best way to fix crawl errors is to preempt them
I use the Broken Link Checker plugin on every site I manage
This plugin scans your site regularly and notifies you when it detects a broken link on your site
This way you can fix the issue before Google crawls the link and reports the crawl error
Another plugin I use religiously is Redirection
There are many redirection plugins available so find your favorite
Any time you make a change to your site that might affect the URL structure of the site or a page or post you should set up a 301 redirect to redirect old URLs to their new URLs
You can also use this to redirect bad backlinks so that Google will get a valid page when it crawls a back link on someone elses site
Using Broken Link Checker and Redirection should enable you to find and fix problems with URLs on your site, in your content and back links from other peoples sites
Once you’ve fixed a crawl error, make sure you mark it as fixed by clicking the blue button in the popup
Then make sure you check back often so you pick up new errors and fix them speedily
Bad SEO on a site can lead to bad back links
Back linking schemes used to be all the rage with SEO’s a few years ago until Google started getting wise to abuse and started penalizing sites for backlinks generated purely for SEO reasons
An example of a bad backlink is content posted on a free ezine site by an SEO just for the purposes of creating a backlink to your site
The content has no value and is only there for the backlink
If you’ve suffered from this type of bad SEO then there’s a report and tool you can use in Google Webmaster Tools
The report is found under Search Traffic > Links To Your Site and shows the sites who link to you the most
Check this report every so often and if you see a site linking to you that you think is bad or spammy then you can disavow this sites links
To disavow bad backlinks, follow the instructions in Google’s documentation in the first link shown here
Use the Disavow Links tool which is found at the second link and is shown here
It may take a while for Google to remove the bad backlinks so be patient
We all know how much the mobile web has changed over the past few years
Google has recognized this and now places greater importance on mobile usability of sites in their ranking
Because of this, they’ve added a Mobile Usability report to Google Webmaster Tools
It can be found under Search Traffic > Mobile Usability
This report shows issues that Google has detected with mobile usability on your site
It shows which pages have a problem and what the problem is
Clicking on an issue and then on a page from the list of pages where the issue was found launches a popup
The popup gives us access to Google’s mobile testing tool
You can use Google’s Mobile Testing Tool to check your site to ensure it is mobile-friendly
But you’ll also find lots of other great mobile testing tools available
If you ask around designers and developers they’ll all have their favorite tools they like to use
My particular favorite is the Chrome Developer Tools inspector
Make sure you check the Mobile Usability report and fix any issues as soon as possible
We’ve already identified that the XML Sitemap is important to search engines
Issues with the XML Sitemap can often go hidden for a long while, after all, how often do you look at your XML Sitemap
However, Google will tell us in Google Webmaster Tools when they have discovered any issues with our XML Sitemap
We can see this by going to Crawl > Sitemaps
Issues will show under the Issues column
Clicking on the issues count will display the Sitemap Details page which will show us a description for any issues
In this example the warnings are related to a 404 page not found for a attachment image in a trashed post
This is obviously something we can ignore, especially as it was detected back in June
The other warning is regarding a time out when trying to crawl a tag archive
Timeouts can happen because of a slow server or server outage so they tend to be transient issues and are resolved the next time Google tries to crawl again
If we can browse to that page and as long as Google doesn’t continue to report the issue then we can ignore it
If Google continues to have a problem reaching that page then it could be an issue with blocked resources so we can check the Blocked Resources report and troubleshoot accordingly
Structured data, often referred to as Schema.org markup is special markup we can add to source code of our web content
It’s used by Google so that they can display rich snippets in search results
Some examples of these rich snippets that you’ve probably seen are:
Products where Google shows the price of the product and whether it’s in stock
Star ratings for a product or something else
Recipe information that shows an image or video, the cooking time and number of calories
Or event information that shows date, venue and ticket price
Here’s an example of product markup and a rich snippet in Google search results
We can add this markup to our sites using plugins for each purpose
An e-commerce plugin such as WooCommerce would output the markup for products
An events plugin would output the markup for events
Some plugins support Schema.org markup, some do not
When Google detects a problem with our structured data, they will notify us in Google Webmaster Tools under Search Appearance > Structured Data
We can check this report for problems and then resolve the problems
Most problems with WordPress sites are related to either HATOM feed or HCARD issues
This is markup that comes from your themes and most themes don’t implement the markup fully or correctly
Fixing these errors usually involves contacting the developer that created the plugin or theme that is outputting the markup and reporting the issue to them
Google also provides a Structured Data Testing Tool which you can use to check your site for issues
It should be noted that this tool has undergone some recent changes to reflect Google’s preference for the newer JSON LD markup
It doesn’t always provide the same results as the Structured Data report in Google Webmaster Tools
This is one of those aspects of your site where you may well need to call on a knowledgeable developer for help
Speed is a very important ranking factor
Google likes pages to load in under 3 seconds
Page load times can be affected by many factors including:
The speed of your internet connection
The size and speed of your server
What type of hosting you are on
The file size of images that load on a page
Whether you call any external scripts or resources such as fonts, videos, maps and social media buttons
You can check the speed of your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool
This tool will give you standard recommendations on how to speed up your site
I have found the recommendations to be the same for almost every site I’ve tested
These are the standard recommendations I see every time with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool
You can implement a caching plugin on your site or your hosting company may implement caching on the server
You defer scripts that aren’t needed for rendering above-the-fold content until later in the page load
This can be very difficult to do because most scripts are added by plugins which control when they are loaded
You absolutely should optimize your image file sizes
Use lossless compression to get the file size of images down as small as you can without impacting the quality of the image
Consult your hosting company about server speed
If you’re on a shared hosting plan then consider investing in a VPS instead
Use a plugin to minify your CSS and JavaScript
Just be careful to test thoroughly to make sure minified scripts don’t break
Avoid using any redirection from one page to another
Check with your hosting provider that GZIP compression is enabled for HTTP requests
Some of these are just good practice, some are out of your control and some come down to who you host with
I just find the recommendations of the PageSpeed Insights tool to be very generic
I prefer to test page load times using Chrome Developer Tools
If you right click on any page and select Inspect from the right click menu then click on the Network tab and do a hard refresh of your page you’ll see a report like this
The magic number is in blue at the bottom
In this example the page loaded in 3.12 seconds which is perfectly acceptable
We can no check the list of what was loaded to see if there’s anything in red
Items in red indicate a problem such as a time out or the item failed to load
In my example here I have some external JavaScript from embed-player.com related to a video that failed to load
This may be something I can fix by loading the video from a different source
It may be caused by the way I embedded the video or by a video plugin I’m using
I typically run this test with all my plugins deactivated to get a baseline
I then activate each plugin one at a time and see if any specific plugin causes the load time to increase significantly
I can then decide whether I need that plugin or can remove or replace it
Don’t forget that the speed of your Internet connection and load on your web server can affect this report
Always check the very first line in the report which shows the initial page request to the server
If that changes significantly then it’s likely due to server load or network speed
Back in August 2014, Google announced that they would start using HTTPS as a ranking signal
The goal was to encourage a safer Internet by rewarding website owners for implementing HTTPS
Implementing HTTPS and an SSL certificate is fairly straightforward
But ensuring that our page is secure and we get the little green padlock can be more challenging
Luckily there is the website Why No Padlock which we can use to detect if there are any problems with HTTPS on a page
Run the URLs for each page through this tool and it will tell you whether there is anything that needs to be resolved in order to get the green padlock symbol in your browser
Finally I’m going to address common issues with local SEO
If you’re running a local business where you want to rank specifically for your area then you want to make sure you have the correct information on your sites and other sites
The first thing is to ensure you have your Name, Address and Phone number, referred to as NAP, on your site
Ideally this should be added using the correct Schema.org markup
There are several sites online that will generate this markup for you, just search for NAP markup generator
Make sure you have business opening hours on your site and a Google Map of your business location
Next, absolutely make sure you have one official approved Google Business listing
Google Business is what used to be Google Places and it merged with Google Plus
Your listing here is the absolute authority for your local SEO information so the information on all other sites, including your own must match what is on Google Business
Make sure you do not have missing, incomplete or conflicting business listings out there on the web
Luckily there’s a tool provided by Moz.com that helps us find inconsistencies with business listings
This tool will show us what listings there are for our business and which ones are incomplete, inconsistent or duplicated
It’s then a process of going through each listing and claiming the listing and correcting any problems
This is painstaking and time consuming work and there are services out there that will do this for you if you pay
This is an important process and one you should follow and verify regularly
