10-day christmas challenge for website optimization

1️⃣ Indexability

Have a look at your robots.txt. Make sure that important areas on your website aren’t excluded from crawling. Watch out so you don’t accidentally keep Google from indexing important URLs.
Ryte shows you information on your robots.txt under Website Success > Indexability > Robots.txt. If anything looks off here, make some changes to your robots.txt and start a new crawl!

2️⃣ Snippets

Title and description are THE identifier for each and every single one of your URLs in the Google Search Results (SERPs). What are things you need to look out for?

• Length: max. 70 characters

• Mention the most important keyword for each site at the beginning and your brand name at the end of the title

Don’t want to count the characters? In the Ryte Suite, you can check the length (max. 70 characters) of your snippet as well as potential duplicates under Website Success > Content > Title (or Description). This way, you can save some time and get straight to optimizing.

3️⃣ ALT-Tags

Use ALT attributes to make images and graphs easily readable for search engines. In case an image cannot be displayed anymore – whatever the reason – the ALT attribute makes sure that the assigned alternative text is visible instead. It also helps to increase your visibility in the image search of search engines as well.
In the Ryte Suite under Website Success > Assets > Images > Alt Values, you can get an overview of your ALT tags. Add ALT tags where they are still missing.

4️⃣ Status Code 404

Not only does a large amount of 404 pages provide a bad user experience for your visitors, but they also interrupt Google’s crawling process and give a signal to search engines that your website is not taken care of regularly. This may be e.g. because these URLs aren’t available on the server anymore, or maybe an error occurred with the URL upon forwarding the links. Check these 404 codes on your sites, set up 301-redirects to the correct URLs where necessary, and check internal links.
With Ryte, you have the possibility to quickly identify these error pages with just a few clicks. Here’s how you find the tool: Go to Website Success > Indexability > Status Codes.

5️⃣ Sitemap.xml

The sitemap is basically a map of your website. It navigates search engines through your pages in order to visit and check them, but Google reserves its right to decide whether these pages will be crawled and indexed. Haven’t created a sitemap yet? Then get started! Many CMSs offer the possibility to create a sitemap. After you are done creating it, make sure – and this is important – that you add it to your Google Search Console. Check your sitemap regularly and update it if you make any changes to your URLs.

6️⃣ Page Speed

This is one of the most important factors when it comes to your online presence. How fast your website loads plays a huge role – for search engines as well as for users. Make sure that your website’s page speed is optimized! Waiting only brings joy if it’s for Santa Claus. Your website will be worse off if users are kept waiting for too long. Because if you aren’t fast enough: your competitors will be for sure…
You can find the first indicators for this using Google itself (Page Speed Insights), or you can use Ryte and check your page speed under Website Success > Performance.
NEW in our tool: Since Core Web Vitals will have a significant influence on your Google ranking from May 2021, you can find our Web Vitals Report in the tool from now on. Discover more on the report here.

7️⃣ Headlines

The headers (h-tags) of your site have two functionalities: They restructure your site and encourage you to keep on reading. Here’s what you should look out for:

• Every page should only contain one h1 headline.

• Use your primary keyword in your h1-tags.

• Avoid unnecessary filler words.

• Additional secondary keywords can be used in further h-tags.

• Use CSS to format your text – headlines are only for structuring!

You can find an overview of all your h-tags in our tool under Website Success > Content > Headlines. The feature showing you duplicate h1 headlines is especially helpful. Be unique and offer reading incentives!

8️⃣ Cannibalization

You optimized your sites for the corresponding important keywords? Well done. But it’s easy to lose sight of which words were defined as keywords where, and if you have already used them somewhere else already. This is why it is useful to get information on whether you are ranking on different sites with the same keywords, and are therefore competing for the same position in the SERPs! You should therefore check your rankings continuously for keyword cannibalization.
Of course, this is done more quickly if you go to our tool: In Search Success, you can find out under Optimize > Cannibalization, if and where you should optimize for this.

9️⃣ Check the CTR of your keywords

Keyword optimization is nice and all – but in the end, we are not doing it to read nice, single-digit numbers in our keyword report. We are doing it, to bring people to our website. It’s about traffic optimization. This is why it is important that you keep an eye on the KPI CTR. Because keywords that achieve a good ranking but bad CTR can lead to a drop in ranking.
You’re not sure if your snippets are performing well in the SERPs? Then you should use our CTR Underperformer report (found under Search Success > Optimize> CTR Underperformer). This shows exactly those keywords, and you can get started with snippet and site optimization right away.

🔟 Hear the bells a-ringing? It’s Christmas!🎄

You’ve made it to the final part of our Christmas challenge. With all the holiday preparations and family time, one thing is important above all: Keep calm!

via GIPHY