#2: Technical SEO

1 hour – Check canonical URLs

Ensure canonicals are being used correctly and are pointing to the actual canonical version of the page.
Canonicals prevent duplication issues (negative SEO). This allows similar content pages to point to the page that has the highest page authority on your website.

30 minutes – Add a Robots.txt file

The Robot.txt file allows you to control which pages the search engines are scanning and which pages they should not. Some websites don’t want certain pages indexed.

For example, if you have a course that you sell on your website, you should tell Google to skip over those pages. Otherwise, potential clients could search for you and find your paid content instead of your free content first.

1 hour – Create a video sitemap

If you publish videos, set up a video sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.

WordPress does have several video sitemap plugins. However, this might also require a programmer to get some of the more complicated parts of this set up.

1 hour – Avoid 301 redirects

Make sure internal pages link directly to pages and do not use a 301 redirect.
301 redirects are used when old pages are replaced, but you should just add the updated URL to the link and skip the 301, as search engines and users prefer this.

Ex: www.seomechanic.com/blog becomes www.seomechanic.com/seo-blog

Just update old internal links to the new URL instead of 301 redirecting.

Yoast Premium can help you speed up this process.

Return to: Table of Contents for SEO Strategy