Basic SEO Troubleshooting - Some Recommendations
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There are a number of things you can do to fix your site after you complete your troubleshooting. Some of them will be obvious depending on the problems you find: adjust your link structure, create appropriate sitemaps, and so forth. Other items will be less obvious. Also, it’s worth keeping in mind that my list is by no means exhaustive; it’s a general list, not specific to any particular site or type of site.
One thing you can do is assign crawling priorities to your Google sitemap tag. This way you can make sure that the most important pages pertaining to your position in the SERPs get crawled first.
Another thing you’ll want to do is take care of canonical issues. Make sure all variations of your home page’s URL redirect to the URL that you’ve decided is your “official” one, generally http://www.yoursite.com/ (with the www at the beginning and the slash at the end). Your official home page URL should be whichever one you’ve focused most of your past link building efforts upon.
Use file compression to optimize the sizes of your images and other files. This means that your site’s size as a whole will be smaller and load faster. Search engine spiders will be able to crawl your site more quickly and index more pages.
As a related issue, you’ll also want to check your server’s response time. Does it deliver good performance? Or is it slower than normal? This is another factor that can seriously affect how quickly the search engine spiders can crawl your site – and thus how much of your site they can index.
There are other factors you can check as well. One of the nice things about forums is that many of them let you search for previous threads, so you can see the advice given to others in your position. But checking the items I described in this article should help you get off to a good start if and when you need to troubleshoot your web site. Good luck!
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