Site Clinic
Site clinic refers to an extensive website examination to find errors in search engine optimization and uncover potential for improvement.
Basic examinations
As part of a site clinic, professionals are usually asked to analyze websites regarding their technical aspects and structure. Gross search engine optimization errors are examined and discovered in the first step. A large number of individual criteria must be examined in order to obtain a broad picture of the architecture of a website. Points of interest include:
- the URL structure,
- breadcrumbs,
- the robots.txt file,
- Google sitemaps,
- canonical tags,
- forwarding,
- number of directories,
- Loading times and
- the length of the URLs.
In depth site clinic
Even deeper examinations are carried out in addition to this fundamental examination. Particularly, the title tags and meta descriptions play an important role in search engine optimization. For this reason, the site clinic checks whether the metadata appears in the required locations, whether they are unique, and the correct length. The link structure is also very important for search engine optimization. A Site clinic checks whether there is a meaningful and natural link structure that is composed evenly of internal and external, dofollow and nofollow links, trust links, and other link types. The anchor texts used, meta tags, and title attributes relevant to search engines can also be tested.
Content is becoming more and more important with regard to the ranking, which is why part of a Site clinic is also dedicated to the field of text quality. This is not only about the added value for readers, which is supported by a good text structure and readability, but also the meaningful use of keywords, a sufficient text length and the use of rich snippets. It also checks whether there is duplicate content, such as the availability of a text via multiple URLs or copies of other sites.
Other areas being analyzed a site within a site clinic are:
- Source code (such as error-free source code and CSS, use of Flash or frames, empty ALT attributes)
- Off-page analysis (such as backlink profile, deep links, social signals)
- Navigation (such as navigation without JavaScript, breadcrumb navigation, distance of unimportant navigation points)
- Research in the Google Search Console (for example, URL parameters, site errors, search queries, duplicate rankings, blocked URLs, XML sitemaps)
How a site clinic can look in practice, show several YouTube videos with Live Site clinics from SEO Conferences.
Result of a site clinic
A list of approach points for website improvement will be created after a site clinic has been completed. Actions to be taken must be derived from this. Prioritization is advisable in order to carry out the most important and urgent tasks first. By working through this catalog of actions, the ranking of a website in the SERPs can be improved over the long term. Once the measures have been implemented, a site clinic should once again be carried out in order to determine whether your efforts have been successful.
Relevance to search engine optimization
Site clinic is always the first step in search engine optimization when it comes to improving the ranking of a website in the search engines. As long as major technical errors in the page structure are not fixed, other SEO measures can only have a limited success. Even if a website is already ranking well, site clinic should be done regularly. This ensures that even after changing the algorithms of search engines, all the prerequisites for success remain.
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