Welcome back. We're now going to
cover site accessibility and indexing.
Getting site accessibility and indexing right
is foundational to good technical SEO.
Rebecca has already covered robots,
text files, sitemaps, and error codes.
So I will just mention those briefly.
What I also want to cover is how to
secure your website and
some additional ways to think about
site accessibility and performance improvements.
What you'll learn in this lesson,
are two major things.
One, the knowledge of the common
site accessibility features and errors,
and two, how to make
these improvements best with the teams you work with.
Rebecca previously talked about robots.txt files,
XML sitemaps, error codes, and redirects.
So I'll touch lightly on
those while presenting my perspective.
I would also point you to xml-sitemaps.com,
it's a great resource for enabling XML sitemap creation.
Familiarity with status codes is
foundational to understanding site accessibility.
Then, when you see
status codes while using tools or plugins,
you'll know what they mean.
The 100s or 1xx refers to those that are informational.
These rarely are visible.
In the 200s, the common one that you'll
see for success is a 200 OK.
It means that the URL can be
easily accessed and rendered successfully.
The 300 relates to redirects.
One you'll commonly see is a 301,
which means the site has been moved permanently,
which is different than a 302,
which refers to temporary.
The 400 codes relate to client errors like
a 404 file not found or a 403 file forbidden.
Generally, you won't see
too many of these other requests,
but they are helpful to know about.
Lastly, are the 500 codes for server errors.
Quite often, you'll see a 500 code or a 504 a gateway
timeout or a 505 HTTP version not supported.
So understanding status codes is
an important indicator for site accessibility.
Let's talk about how you can identify 404 errors.
Cleaning them up is not
a foolproof way to improve search rankings.
In fact 404s typically
improve the site's user experience and crawlability.
So if you're going to prioritize
404 errors, appreciate its impact.
The Google Search Console,
Screaming Frog, and similar
tools will point out broken links.
The ideal scenario with
404 errors especially out of the search console,
is to use the crawl error section to identify 404 errors.
Notice where they are linked from,
then you can do an HT access file 301
redirect to send them to
the next-best site or a parent page.
It's preferable to identify
the root cause of 404 creation.
For example, at end of life at that page.
Perhaps somebody in the organization needs to
be informed or educated that are
redirect to a more relevant page
is better than just letting 404s hang out there.
Also, note that it's not critical to fix every 404,
prioritize those that have more inbound links
or are arrived at more frequently by users.
Another way to improve
site accessibility is to secure your website.
Moving to HTTPS will benefit the site typically.
If search rankings are a critical factor,
I recommend you test HTTP versus HTTPS.
This is not foolproof.
Moving to HTTPS does
not 100 percent guarantee better rankings.
So evaluate closely if search rankings are
a significant reason for moving to a secured site,
and consider how it might be tested.
But if you're an e-commerce,
payment processors likely or
setting up HTTPS automatically.
Some best practices for using
HTTPS are using robust security certificates,
redirecting your users and search engines to the HTTPS,
with server-side 301 HTTP redirects,
and using relative URLs for
resources that might reside on the same secure domain.
There is little to no correlation as
a ranking signal for HTTPS.
But it is a best practice,
and helps communicate the secure value
of your site to your users.
Lastly, let's focus on XML sitemaps.
I strongly recommend that you put XML sitemaps in place.
They improve crawl prioritization,
crawl accuracy, and crawl speed.
Theoretically, a search bot will crawl
every page on your site sooner or later.
But by having URLs and sitemaps,
this ensures that they are crawled in a priority order,
they keep the URLs current for what gets crawled,
they are correctly segmented,
and you can use smaller sitemaps to give search bots
a clear indication of where
the priorities are for your website.
