On-Site Technical SEO

Audit

‘Put together’ by the SEO Pragmatists

http://designyourownblog.com

Summary of Detected Issues

Issue Summary

Technical Site Overview

Crawl Data

Site Overview

Crawl & Technical SEO Site DataWhen crawling the site, we found:

• 4,409 URLs•

212 ‘core’ site URLs• Core addresses include only those which should be

unique and search accessible with unique Meta data• Core addresses exclude broken pages (404s),

redirecting addresses, images, PDF documents, parameter URLs etc.

• This means that core site URLs build a relatively low 4.8% of all addresses on-site

Site Overview

Pages by Address Type

Site Overview

62% of all on-site addresses are built up of “?replytocom=” parameter URLs. Their function is to provide a URL which signposts a particular comment or allows someone to quickly reply to a certain ID’d comment simply by visiting the specified address

These URLs can be disabled using Yoast’s WordPress plugin, more information here:https://moz.com/community/q/should-i-remove-the-replytocom-variables-in-wordpress

Replytocom URL variables eat up Google crawl-allowance and can cause perceived ‘duplicate content’ issues (as 99% of the content is the same as on the base-URL). Even if canonical tags are used, for crawl allowance reasons we’d strongly suggest getting rid of these. Look how much they’re bloating the site! It’s not necessary

26% of all addresses on-site are images. By file-size, only 19% of the site is built up of images. Usually speaking, the file-size percentage is larger so some good work has been done here. That being said, it may be possible to use lossless image compression to save more disk-space and bandwidth, resulting in faster page-loading speeds (which will impress Google)

Core URLs: Page Titles21% of page titles across core-site URLs are in ‘good’ health from a top down perspective, this is not great

78% of page titles are suffering from bad-length issues, this means that these page titles are too short or too long. Titles which are too long crop off on Google’s search results (as SERP titles) and titles which are too short have further room for SEO optimisation!

We should re-write all afflicted Page Titles in order to better increase our search engine ranking positions on Google, Bing, and other leading search engines

Site Overview

Core URLs: Meta DescriptionsOnly 11% of descriptions across core-site URLs are in ‘good’ health from a top down perspective, this is slightly poor

78% of descriptions are entirely missing whilst others are suffering from bad length and internal duplication-related issues

We should re-write all afflicted Descriptions in order to optimise the conversion rates of our current SERPs (search engine ranking positions)

Site Overview

This is where Meta descriptions may appear on Google’s search results, it’s important that they are present and enticing

Core URLs: H1s78% of H1s across core-site URLs are in ‘good’ health from a top down perspective, this truly outstanding

19% of core-site H1s are suffering from bad length related issues. This means that H1s could be too long (too diluted) or too short (ill-optimised)

We should re-write all afflicted H1s in order to better increase our SERPs (search engine ranking positions) on Google, Bing and other leading search engines. Also make changes so that there can only be one H1 per page!

Site Overview

Technical SEO Issues… what did we uncover?

Tech Issues

Architecture: ‘Replytocom’ URLs• Most on-site URLs are built up of addresses which contain “?replytocom=” in the URL. These URLs are

hardly add anything in terms of user / site functionality, but they have bloated the site’s number of addresses in the extreme

• Here’s an example of such a URL:• http://designyourownblog.com/tutorial-how-to-create-blog-favicon/?replytocom=115325

• Replytocom URL variables eat up Google crawl-allowance and can cause perceived ‘duplicate content’ issues (as 99% of the content is the same as on the base-URL). Even if canonical tags are used, for crawl allowance reasons we’d strongly suggest getting rid of these. Look how much they’re bloating the site! It’s not necessary

• Install (if it’s not installed already) the “Yoast” WordPress plugin (it’s free), enable the option to remove the replytocom variables

Issue #1

Action Point(s): Disable “?replytocom=“ URLs, try to do this from Yoast

• The correct 404 status code is served and the page looks ok, except for this part:

• The problem with this is that it’s not very helpful to an average end-user. Most end-users aren’t familiar with hack-bashing or reconstructing URLs! Would it be possible to use on-site 301 redirects

to always apply this fix on the user’s behalf? Let’s put our heads together

Unhelpful 404 Page

Issue #3

Example URL: http://designyourownblog.com/made-up-url

Action Point(s): We can chat through potential solutions

• Here's an example of an image which is not web optimised: http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Julie-Harris-Design-Pinterest.gif• The image has not been downsized or compressed at all so Page-Speed Insights

won't even accept the URL in terms of evaluation (it’s 13.97MB in file-size):

• We could assess which images could be further compressed. We could use Kraken.io to compress the top offending (by file size) images. We‘d send these tactically selected (and freshly compressed) images to you, so that your developer can use FTP to replace the images with our more highly compressed substitutes

• We‘d use lossless compression where possible• Compressed images will be sent across in the future if you want to pay us to perform this work

for you

Potential Misuse of Large Images

Issue #6

Action Point(s): We can compress offending images and send them to you

Issues with Meta Data, Titles & H1s• Page Titles should be further optimised, with 78% suffering from

bad-length issues. Only 21% of core addresses contain Page Titles with no surface-level issues

•

Meta Descriptions should be further optimised, with 78% of core-site Meta descriptions being entirely missing

•

19% of core site URLs are suffering from H1s with a ‘bad’ length (too short or too long, room for further optimisation etc.)

• We’d like to recommend unique, high quality Meta data (descriptions, titles and H1s) for all core-site URLs

Issue #7

Action Point(s): We can write new Meta data for you if required

• Although no single tag can turn a website’s SEO performance around by itself, the H1 is important for SEO:

• The H1 used on the homepage is just a repetition of branding• A better homepage H1 might be “Welcome to Design Your Own Blog: Blog-Design Guides

& Advice”• The H1 is a key HTML tag in terms of search engine optimisation. It’s also for users, so

obviously the branding should still be in there. All we’re suggesting is including one or two keywords so that the homepage’s H1 doesn’t completely go to waste

• To the right we have pictured a table containing a few keywords which you could use within your H1 tag (not all of them, obviously)

Mediocre H1 on Homepage

Issue #8 Action Point(s): Write a new homepage H1, include some keywords

• Here is Design Your Own Blog’s homepage keyword cloud:

• Overall, the keyword cloud shows that the homepage is fairly well optimised. Only two words (“Blog" and “Design") which relate to relevant products (or super-categories) appear very large, but these are the two words which sum up the site and its contained information so that’s fine

• It would be really great to see a couple more keywords (or even 'key-phrases') better optimised on the homepage, even if those instances serve as links to other areas of the site. Maybe different keyword variants such as “blogging” and “designed” or “designing”. We understand that the homepage content is somewhat transient, as a lot of it comes from a changing feed

Homepage Keyword Cloud

Issue #9 Action Point(s): Maybe add more keyword optimised content to the homepage

• Here’s an example of in-source JavaScript from the homepage:

• It’s best to save JavaScript code into source-linked JavaScript (‘.js’) files. Some scripts on-site are already linked in correctly, but not all

• Saving JavaScript modules to external files means that they only have to be loaded once, when a user first visits the site. They don’t have to be re-loaded for every new page the user visits. Doing this has the potential to positively impact page-load speeds

Issue #10

In-source JavaScript

Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

• Here’s an example of in-source CSS from the homepage:

• It’s best to save CSS source-linked StyleSheet (‘.css’) files. StyleSheets on-site are already linked in correctly, but not all

• Saving CSS rules to external files means that they only have to be loaded once, when a user first visits the site. They don’t have to be re-loaded for every new page the user visits. Doing this has the potential to positively impact page-load speeds

Issue #10

In-source CSS

Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

• The homepage is a good example, there are 7 examples of inline CSS which is not saved into external CSS files:

• Most of this could be saved in external CSS files and linked in to the source code, as is already the case for some .CSS StyleSheets. This would mean that when a user or search engine loads a new page, the CSS would already be cached from previous pages (slightly improving page-load speeds across the site). A list of inline CSS on the homepage will be supplied separately

Issue #11

Inline CSS (StyleSheets)<div class="title-with-bg" style="background-image:url(http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/start-a-blog-design-tutorials-inspiration2.jpg);"></div>

<h5 class="post-footer-optin" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 20px;"></h5>

<div id='ck_success_msg' style='display:none;'></div>

<div id="ck_error_msg" style="display:none"></div>

<label class="ck_label" for="ck_emailField" style="display: none"></label>

<div class="title-with-bg" style="background-image:url(http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/uploads/designyourownblog-com-blog-tour-b-2014.jpg);"></div>

<h5 class="post-footer-optin" style="margin-bottom: 20px;"></h5>

Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

CSS and JavaScript Minification• Some documents on the Design Your Own Blog website

contain JavaScript and CSS which could be minified to improve site performance:

• This basically means that the scripts and StyleSheets in question could have their code re-written so that they are smaller / shorter whilst retaining the same functionality. Think of this as an analogue of writing down the simplest, most ‘elegant’ version of a mathematical equation

• The result will be the same, but the time taken to ‘read’ the scripts will be lessened

Issue #4Issue #12

Non-Minified CSS Files:http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/plugins/click-to-tweet-by-todaymade/assets/css/styles.css?ver=bb2b5d4c54e5d24c3824507bcdfa73e5

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/plugins/shortcodes-indep/css/frontend-style.css?ver=bb2b5d4c54e5d24c3824507bcdfa73e5

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/themes/simplemag-child/style.css?ver=bb2b5d4c54e5d24c3824507bcdfa73e5 http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Oswald%7CLato&ver=1477454961

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/plugins/commentluv/css/commentluv.css?ver=bb2b5d4c54e5d24c3824507bcdfa73e5

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-affiliate-platform/affiliate_platform_style.css

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/themes/simplemag/style.css

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/themes/simplemag-child/fonts/fonts.css

Non-Minified JavaScript Files:

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/plugins/commentluv/js/commentluv.js?ver=2.94.7

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/plugins/dyob-collapsing-widgets/assets/collapsing-widgets.js?ver=1.0.0

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/themes/simplemag/js/jquery.assets.js?ver=1.0

http://designyourownblog.com/wp-content/themes/simplemag/js/jquery.custom.js?ver=1.0

Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

IP Address Canonicalization • The IP address of Design Your Own Blog is not canonicalised to

redirect to the base domain:

• This could - in some rare circumstances, cause authority to vent (if other webmasters are linking to the IP address)

• This isn't a big issue but it's quick and simple to fix, so let's get it done

Issue #4Issue #13

Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

Web & SEO SecurityGoogle loves secure sites

SEO Security

• Design Your Own Blog has an inactive server signature (this is good) and grants access to the user-agent of Libwww-perl (this is bad):

• Not all applications identified as Libwww-perl are malicious, but many are

• A common application for Libwww-perl is on bot-nets. First a bot-net will look for a vulnerability on your website, then it will embed itself using up your storage space and (more importantly) server processing power. This should be fixed ASAP!Issue

#15

Server Signature & Libwww-perl Access

Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

HTTPS Not Set as Default• HTTPS is not the default method for accessing pages on Design Your

Own Blog

• Google is pushing all webmasters to make the switch to HTTPS, this came about as a result of Edward Snowden’s revelations on state-sponsored spying

• HTTPS encrypts connections and data for users as they interact with the website, providing greater overall security

• It is true that switching to HTTPS can cause very minor increases in page-load speed, however modern servers and hosting environments have largely overcome this obstacle

• If we tackle the Page-Speed issues outlined on the following slides, we could safely implement HTTPS across Design Your Own Blog. An SSL certificate will be requiredIssue

#10Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

Page-Speed Insights… how fast is the site?

Page-Speed

Google Page-Speed Insights Read OutNeither the desktop nor mobile scores are positive. Score’s are fairly poor.

Google gives some handy hints on what to fix – your developer(s) may be able to tackle these

Issue #17

Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

Google Mobile Friendly Tool Read OutDesign Your Own Blog has a mobile friendly site design. This also means the site

will gain some slight ranking bonuses on mobile and tablet search.

No Issue

Bing Mobile Friendly Tool Read OutMicrosoft’s tool (Bing branded) can’t even load a set of results, as the Design Your Own Blog site is too slow to return its homepage's appended resources in a timely fashion

Issue #18

Action Point(s): Handle inline with issues from slide 25

Google Mobile Web-Speed Tester Read OutGoogle’s Mobile Website Speed Tester is a new tool aiming to combine some data from Page-

Speed Insights and the old Mobile Friendly tool. The insights are supposed to be simpler, clearer and more accurate As referenced by the read-outs from the

previous two tools; mobile UX is doing really well whilst page-load speed is suffering a lot, this is especially true on mobile:

Issue #19

Action Point(s): Handle inline with issues from slide 25

The homepage makes 100 HTTP requests in order to locate, return and load all its appended resources. This is something a designer / developer may be able to help you look into in greater detail.

Whilst the tool which we use to check this cites that 20 HTTP requests is too many, we actually feel that up to 50 (maybe even 75 at a push) is acceptable

That being said, the homepage is loading a total of 100 objects which does seem a little bit over the top

Consult a designer to see if ‘sprite-sheets’ could be used to cut down on image requests. A developer may be able to combine scripts to reduce the number of objects being pulled into each page

Issue #20

Excessive HTTP Requests

Note: Excessive HTTP requests can cause problems for a site’s page-load speed. Loading the same amount of data from more fragmented sources takes longer, as processing power must be expended switching between different ‘objects’

Action Point(s): You’ll need a developer if you want to look at this!

Robots.txt & Sitemap.xml

State of Indexation

Indexation

Are the Indexation Files Optimised?When testing the main, page-related Sitemap.XML file (http://designyourownblog.com/page-sitemap.xml

- generated with the Yoast SEO plugin) we found that all pages loaded correctly (Status code 200 – OK):

The Robots.txt file seems to be well optimised with no obvious errors, which is great!

If there are any indexation issues later, you can try removing the WP Plugins disallow… It may be preventing Google from ‘rendering’ some pages accurately, as plugins often contain their own CSS / JavaScript. Don’t move on this unless you notice wacky rendering from Google

No Issue

Questions!?email: jamesrichardallen@gmail.com