Improve your discoverability and visibility with a technical SEO checklist

Technical SEO factors that impact indexation

One issue that impacts many small businesses is that they may unintentionally block their site from search engines. If your website isn't allowed to be discovered by search engines, then your web pages won't get included in search results. Here are some of the most common technical fixes.

Submit your website to Google Search Console

Verify your site ownership with Google Search Console to index specific pages. This ensures they show up in search, in addition to giving you the chance to see which keywords searchers use to find your site. These insights will give you a better understanding of how your site currently performs so you can make data-driven decisions about improving your search visibility.

Follow these steps to improve your search results:

• Go to Google Search Console to view how Google Search sees your pages. Click “Add Property” to add a website property to your Search Console account.
• Use the URL inspection tool to verify that your page can be indexed and when it was last crawled to ensure Google updates its search results with your latest content.

Submit a sitemap to search engines

What is a sitemap? Think of it as the roadmap search engines use to find your content. A sitemap provides a list of all the pages on your website, which the search engine uses as a starting point for finding, crawling, and indexing your content. While not required, submitting a sitemap makes it easier for a search engine to help searchers find what they are looking for.

There are four sitemap types to be aware of:

• XML sitemaps
• Video sitemaps
• News sitemaps
• Image sitemaps

You'll want to focus on the XML sitemap to improve your search results — submit your XML sitemap in Google Search Console to help your site get indexed faster. You can also use Search Console to see how many pages have already been added to Google's index, along with being able to report any errors if pages are missing or no longer valid.

Learn how to build and create a sitemap to ensure you provide Google with everything it needs to index your site effectively.

Check your robots.txt file

A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages can be discovered. You can also use a robots.txt file to indicate to Google certain pages on your website you don't want it to crawl and display in search results, which then lets you put more search authority toward more important pages where you want to direct traffic.

Check out these resources for how to fix common robots.txt issues. Plus, here are a few tips to make the most out of your robots.txt file:

• Make sure your robots.txt file is in your root folder to ensure the crawler can find it.
• If your pages display incorrectly in a search result, check the page to see if the crawler is allowed to access required external files.
• Add your sitemap URL to your robots.txt file to help search engines easily find it so they can more efficiently crawl the rest of your site.
• Make sure to test your robots.txt file before you go live. Here's how to test a robots.txt file. You can also submit a URL to the robots.txt tester tool to see whether or not your file is blocking web crawlers from accessing specific URLs.
• If you look through the robots.txt file you might see “Disallow: /" followed by a list of URLs. What does disallow mean in robots.txt? It means any URL listed here will not be crawled or displayed in search. You can use this to your advantage if you have a website or webpage that is still under development and not ready for the public. All you have to do is add the URL to that page in the “Disallow” section on the robots.txt file to block crawlers from finding it. Don't forget to remove the disallow rule once the page is ready for viewing.
• Google Search Console can give you a list of submitted URLs that are blocked by your robots.txt file to see if there are any that shouldn't be on the list. You can then delete those from the file and resubmit your sitemap so crawlers can update their records.
• If you're using WordPress, utilize the robots.txt file generator within the Yoast SEO plugin to edit.

Check the “noindex” meta tag

The noindex tag is a line of code that tells search engines to ignore a specific page when adding your site to its search index so that it doesn't appear in search results. If you have a page that is not showing up, check to see if it has the noindex tag placed somewhere in the head section of the page and remove it if necessary.

You can use Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool or index coverage report to quickly find all the pages using the noindex page so you avoid accidentally leaving one up.

Additional technical SEO factors that improve search engine visibility

Besides the above technical tips, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of actions you can take to optimize your search engine visibility through your use of content. Here are a few areas to focus on:

Optimize your homepage title tag

If you go to your website's homepage and hover over your browser tab, does the browser tab text say the words, “Home | Your Website"? If so, create a concise page title tag that includes the search term that best describes your business to help raise your organic visibility and click-through rate.

Below are title tag optimization tips you can use to choose the right content for your home page title tag:

• Use keyword research to see what people are looking for
• Use searcher intent to make sure the page delivers what people expect in terms of answering a question or need
• Avoid spammy headers that don't match the page content
• Avoid repetitive title tags across different pages
• Limit the character count to less than 70 characters to keep it from being cut off

Consider your keyword placement

Keywords help increase the visibility of pages by attracting users who are searching for specific terms. Generate visibility with target keywords by choosing the keywords you want to rank for and then integrate them into your titles, body content, and meta tags.

You can also review competitor websites to see how they leverage the keywords you are targeting to find opportunities to improve your keyword choice and implementation.

Not enough backlinks

Backlinks from other websites to your webpage tell search engines that your page is an authority for specific keywords, making it more likely that the search engine will display your page over a competitor.

A link-building strategy can help you proactively build quality backlinks by identifying opportunities to get your page linked across industry web pages, blogs, resource pages, and other websites.

Importance of optimizing alt text

Optimizing your images can help you improve both the user experience and the web crawler experience by making pages easier to load and navigate. The importance of image alt text optimization for web crawlers can't be overstated. This text tells the crawler what the image is so that it can return the image in a search.

Meanwhile, an image that has been properly sized will load faster, which improves both the user experience and the odds that others will provide a backlink.

Tips for optimizing images to improve page speed and SEO include:

• Create descriptive file names that include your targeted keyword
• Use descriptive alt text that includes keywords
• Use the smallest image size possible for your page

Check the impact your images have on your site using Google's Page Speed Test tool. All you have to do is type in your website to get a list of the highest-priority issues bogging down your site, including a list of images slowing down the website loading speed and insight into what a reduction in size for those images can do for your site speed.

You can then use a tool like Compressor.io to reduce image file size. It's a simple fix and win for both the user experience and SEO.

Conduct an SEO audit to check for duplicate content issues

An in-depth SEO audit can help you find other issues so you can act on high-priority items. For example, it can help you find duplicate content issues so you can find clusters of duplicate and near-duplicate pages and redirect them to the canonical page.

An SEO audit can also help you discover if any pages are being penalized by Google due to a change in their algorithm.

For more advice on improving SEO, check out these four steps to getting on the first page of local organic search results.