1. Back to the basics

When it comes to technical SEO, it always pays to go back to the beginning, ensuring that title tags, meta descriptions, header tags and alt attributes are used correctly. These elements will help to give relevance to the content topic of each page, which helps search engines understand the content and improve the chances of it being included in the search results for related search queries.

2. Monitor indexed pages

WooRank reports return the number of pages that the tool was able to discover. Search engines index pages to build a record of every web page they can find (that are of some value), giving them a snapshot of the World Wide Web. To give you some idea of the scale, in March 2013, Google reported that its index had reached 30 trillion individual pages.

When a page is indexed, it’s included in the pool of results that’re called upon whenever the page is deemed as a suitable result for a user's search query. You can find out how many pages that Google and Bing have indexed from your website using Google Search Console (Google Index > Index Status) and Bing Webmaster Tools (Reports & Data > Total Pages Indexed).

If you find that the number of indexed pages is much higher or lower than you expected, you may have some issues. This is common, and usually caused by parameters being indexed as pages. For example, eCommerce sites often use parameters to allow users to filter products, but in most cases, these internal results shouldn’t be available for indexing. There are many ways to identify and fix issues caused by parameters, including the use of the canonical tag.

3. Fix broken links

Links help to pass value between internal and external pages. The more link juice your site receives, the more authority it has, which is why having broken links is the equivalent of throwing authority away. With WooRank reviews, you can check on your broken links to make sure and plug holes that are leaking juice, which means keeping control over your site’s authority.

4. Check XML sitemaps

WooRank checks whether your website has an XML sitemap. This is a file that contains a list of your web pages, which can then be submitted to the search engines. It’s important to only include the pages that you want the search engines to crawl and index, and all URLs should return a status 200 (no redirects, 404 errors, etc.).

5. Make sure pages can only be accessed via a single URL

If your site is running both www- and non-www- URLs without redirecting one to the other, or if other URLs load the same content, the potential page authority may be diluted across the duplicate versions. You’re also leaving it up to them to decide which page should be displayed in results, which isn’t always the version that you had in mind.

Using URL rewriting, you can force users and link juice redirect to the correct version of your URLs via a 301 permanent redirect. The most common redirects require you to:

• Choose whether you wish to include www in your URLs, then redirect to the chosen format. For example, if you decided not to include www, http://www.mystic.com would redirect to http://mystic.com
• Force lowercase characters (assuming that your URLs are SEO friendly and do not include uppercase characters). For example, http://mystic.com/Page1 would redirect to http://mystic.com/page1
• Strip out (or add - depending on your preference) trailing slashes to the end of all URLs, for example http://mystic.com/page1/ would redirect to http://mystic.com/page1.

6. Check your site’s mobile friendliness

We live in an age where mobile search has surpassed desktop search - that means that mobile compatibility should be a top priority for any site. That means you have to check everything, from mobile render of objects, touch screen readiness, button size, to general design and user experience. Luckily, WooRank lets you check all of those things in one handy test, saving you time and helping you see where your site needs the most work.

7. Optimise for speed

Remember when site users would wait as long as it took for content to load? Ask anyone under the age of 25 if they would wait more than a few seconds and they’ll probably answer with a resounding “No”. Users have become accustomed to instant results whenever they want them, which means every second they have to wait will be reflected in your bounce rate. Check the many ways that you could save time with any of WooRank’s handy speed tips.

8. Fix your crawl errors

Crawl errors occur when pages fail to load, whether due to a typo in a link, or an error with the page loading. WooRank allows you to sync with your Google Search Console account to pull crawl errors into your report. Using this, you can identify the URL that caused the error, the response code and the source of the linking page. You can also remove the errors as you fix them, and get a snapshot of your progress with data from the last 90 days.

Sam, that's excellent, thank you so much. Invaluable information and a tool I'm sure our readers are going to be racing to try. If any of you would like to look in more detail, you can create an account and try out the WooRank 14 day free trial, it's pretty cool.

WooRank is a Belgium based company formed in 2010. It provides easy-to-use Web-based software that generates instant website reviews offering loads of valuable data combined with a list of comprehensive tasks. This helps businesses and online marketers increase online visibility and achieve higher search engine rankings, convert more visitors into customers, keep track of their competitors and get more return on their digital marketing investments.

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