SEO Checklist For 2024 are you ready to turn your website into the talk of the town? This guide is your cheat code for a successful online presence. No jargon, just straightforward steps to give your website the spotlight it deserves in 2024. Let’s make your website the life of the digital party together!
Before starting the content let’s see what we can achieve by reading this content. We can basically achieve three things from this content And these are:
After reading this song you will get all benefits
- Audit the website and find opportunities for more traffic and visibility
- Unraveling the technical issues that have been blocking your website’s visibility and traffic until now
- Looking at website content and finding and developing new creative and strategic options.
Optimizing Visibility: Unindexed Subdomains Check
We know by using Google’s “site:” search operator: Enter “site:URL” into Google’s search bar. If your page appears in the search results, it’s (most likely) indexed.
But Right now, in this SEO Checklist For 2024, to see if the pages of your You have to use Site Operator for website are not indexed. If there is no test or staging domain left open for indexing, like Google has indexed it and traffic is diverting on it. Also, in this test, you don’t have to enter the HTTPS www domain after the site colon. You just have to type the domain as it is, the naked domain. So that Google can find and remove your hidden subdomains. Site Operator often removes such pages hidden in many websites, which we are not able to catch in any other type of audit. And the bigger the website, the more loss this type of poor quality and unwanted subdomains and pages cause. So find them and make them no indexed or unavailable for Google Search.
Google Search Console (GSC) Audit
GSC means Google Search Console. This is the primary tool that covers the organic part of your website. Now Google Search Console in very big tool. It has a lot of information. That’s why I will provide you a list of what you have to check for this checklist:
- Pages with 5XX error
- Pages with 403 error
- Discovered/crawled, currently not indexed error
- Manual action in search console?
- Security message in search console?
- Removal request in search console?
Google Analytics Audit
Google Analytics can analyze the complete traffic of your website. Where only search results capture the traffic coming from Google Search Result “SERP” page. Whereas Analytics can measure the traffic coming from any source. It can keep an account So you can use Google Analytics to get more details of your website traffic. But again, This tool also provides a lot of data.
So what do you have to see for this SEO Checklist For 2024? I will tell you in short.
- Missing GA code?
- Pages with O/1 clicks from search?
- Indexing bloat on the site?
Sitemap Audit
Creating a sitemap is not a mandatory requirement for getting your website indexed by search engines, but it serves as a valuable tool to communicate with search engine bots, especially Googlebot. Through a sitemap, you can provide specific instructions on which pages to index, prioritize certain content, and indicate the frequency of updates. When configuring your sitemap, it’s crucial to consider various options to optimize its effectiveness.
Firstly, you should focus on the following key points:
- Is there A sitemap?
- Submitted in GSC?
- Clean & clear sitemap?
- Indexed pages in sitemap?
- Remove O/1 click pages from sitemap
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file plays a crucial role in guiding search engines on which pages and directories to crawl or avoid. This file serves as a set of instructions for web crawlers, providing essential information for efficient indexing. When creating or modifying your robots.txt file, consider the following checklist:
- Allow important pages/folders
- Allow category pages
- Add sitemap URL
Navigation Audit
Navigation means menus, your website is just not a homepage There are many internal pages and way to reach all these pages opens with the navigation of your website. It is like home gallery if the gallery is not connected to the all rooms, then either the room is very secret or people will not be able to reach there. Naturally the homepage of your website receives the most traffic and if the navigation of your website is good and inviting then the traffic coming to the homepage. You can take it to the internal pages and you can increase the dwell time more traffic will come. For this SEO Checklist For 2024 these points you have to check in the menu of your website:
- Make intuitive menu
- Connect internal pages
- Use breadcrumbs
Backlink Audit
There are lot of tools to audit backlinks that provide a lot of data. But what will you see in the backlinks data? That’s what everyone sees DA, PA, Spam Score you can also see all that. But along with that there are a lot of things to see for example:
- Link to one non-www or www only
- Don’t link to spammy websites
- Top pages must be most linked
- Top pages must have most internal links
- Get reputed links
On Page Audit
Conducting an on-page audit is a fundamental aspect of optimizing a website for search engines, ensuring that it aligns with best practices and maximizes its visibility in search results. In this comprehensive evaluation, several key factors are examined to enhance the overall SEO performance of the website.
- URLs should be SEO friendly
- Keywords in URLs’ slug, title, images’ alt, and H1 & H2
- Content length should be satisfactory
- Link to internal pages in content
Page Speed
A while ago, the speed of the website was a separate independent ranking signal. Which we use to call page experience signal. But now Google has packaged it in the helpful content system. So the speed of your website is still a ranking signal in. That means if the speed of your website is down, or the speed of a particular page is down then its content may not be considered helpful by Google. No matter how good quality it is written, manually written by a human writer, best copywriter, but if its speed is low, it is not performing well, loading slow in user’s device then Google will not consider it helpful. In this situation, you should see that your website performs well. You can do this test through GTmetrix and Google’s own Page Speed insights
Orphan Pages
If there is a page that you have made willingly, and you consider it good, but it is neither link to any main page, or is it linked to any other pages that you have indexed. If there is no link, then what will you call such a page? A page that no one recognized, no one take care of it yes, it is an orphan. Such orphan pages often lower the SEO value of your website. Because the chances of it being indexed are very low. The chances of it being crawled are very low. Because how will you get its address right? And the chances of these pages being ranked are also lower. and you keep getting worried that i am posting content, but it is not ranking. So you have to find such pages. How you can find you can use tools like “Screaming frog” for finding these pages.
404 Pages
With this, you can see the error in Google Search Console page not found. It is not important or problematic thing in itself. But when you are trying to solve this not so important issue and create another on the website, then the problem arises. SO whenever you go to the Google Search Console report and see the page not found error, then you have to see first the URL Google is telling 404, did you ever make it seriously? Is that page getting a link somewhere on your website’s other page or navigation, internal content? If you are getting such a link, then you go and correct that link so that this problem can be solved.
If this link is being used only in external pages, in backlinks which does not exist now, then you don’t have to do anything for that URL You can ignore this problem. Any 404 URL should not be redirect to homepage or any other page in bulk. If you do this your chances of being beneficial are very low, there can be more loss. Apart from that, when you check 404 pages you don’t just have to look at the design that you can see the 404 message on the screen its well and good, you have to check Google Developers Tools and you have to see that here you can only see the 404 status code in red color.
You have to check the 404 status code for your 404 page, you have to verify it if you can see 404, then its good. If you can’t see it, then you need to talk to the developer. You need to ask him that after all, why you can’t see other status code other than 404? I only need 404.
Conclusion
In summary, SEO Checklist For 2024, conduct a thorough audit to uncover traffic opportunities and technical issues. Utilize Google Search Console and Analytics to address errors, security concerns, and optimize tracking codes. Pay attention to sitemap cleanliness and navigation for effective communication with search engines. Backlink quality is key, and on-page optimization, including page speed, plays a crucial role in SEO success. Address orphan pages and 404 errors carefully, maintaining a cohesive website structure for optimal performance.