SEO
What the findings of the SEO check mean and how to fix them. The topics follow the categories of the report.
Crawlability
What host variants are
Your website can usually be reached under four spellings: with and without www, over http and https. If they do not all redirect to one address, search engines see several copies of the same page.
What determines indexability
A page only appears in search results if the search engine may add it to its index. A single noindex in the code or in a server header prevents that.
What robots.txt does
robots.txt is a text file in the root of your website. It tells crawlers which areas to skip and gives the address of your sitemap.
What an XML sitemap does
An XML sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website, written for search engines. It helps them find pages that are barely linked and tells them when something changed.
What the canonical tag does
The canonical tag names the authoritative address of a page. When the same page can be reached under several addresses, the search engine knows which one to show.
What makes a proper 404 page
A page that does not exist must answer with status 404. If the server sends status 200 instead, the search engine takes the error page for real content.
What broken links cost
A broken link leads nowhere: the target page does not answer or returns an error. For visitors it is a dead end, for search engines a lost path to your content.
Content and meta data
What the page title does
The page title is the headline of your search result and the name in the browser tab. In a few words it tells search engines, visitors and screen readers what the page is about.
What the meta description does
The meta description is a short summary of the page in its code. Search engines often show it as the text line under the title, where it gives people a reason to click.
What the H1 heading does
The H1 is the main heading of a page. At a glance it tells readers, search engines and screen readers what the page is about.
How much text a page needs
Search engines classify a page mainly by its text. If there is hardly anything on it, they do not know which searches to show it for.
What the viewport tag does
The viewport tag tells phones that the page adapts to the width of the screen. Without it they show the page shrunk down, as on a desktop.
Preview and structured data
What Open Graph tags do
Open Graph tags set what a shared link looks like: title, description and image. Messengers and social networks build the preview from them.
What structured data does
Structured data describes in machine-readable form what a page is about: a company, a product, an article, an event. Search engines use it to build rich results.
What a favicon needs
The favicon is the small icon of your website. It appears in the browser tab, in bookmarks and next to your result in Google.
What hreflang does
hreflang links connect the language versions of a page. They let search engines show every user the version in their language.