Incorrect Indexation is a common and high-priority task if found not to be set correctly.

Webmasters have the ability to mark a page 'Index' or 'No-index' which signals to search engines whether the page should be included in their index.

This tag is very important because incorrectly setting could wipe your site off Google and your rankings would start dropping to zero if not addressed.

This tag is also helpful if you have pages that you wish to keep on the website for visitors but don't wish search engines to include (like a thank you page after completing a form). This tag could also be used if you have pages with thin content or duplicate as these poor-quality pages could bring your overall site SEO performance down.

When performing a technical SEO audit, this is one of the first checks Bravr do with any site. 

Search engines like Google have created guidelines for best practices when building a website. These were put in place to help search engine crawls easily discover webpages throughout your site and identify various elements of the page.

Things like schema markup (structured data) help tag elements on the page to remove the guesswork done by Google, this often results in a small reward in rankings. All of the tiny micro-rewards so add up if implemented correctly.

The worldwide web is continually growing which makes it increasingly more difficult for Google to decide the best web page results to present to a user when doing a search. Having poor technical SEO is a signal to Google that your site may not give a good user experience, which we likely result in poor ranking.

There is a range of options for dealing with technical SEO but many in our experience can be a bit hit-and-miss, giving false positives and leading you in the wrong direction in terms of priority.

The better tools tend to be agency level which I imagine doesn't surprise anyone, it's like trying to fix your own car, dealership garages will have much more advanced equipment for dealing with problems in a more effective way.

Here are a few examples of some of the best tools in our experience which Bravr use when doing a technical SEO audit:

• Screaming Frog
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Majestic

Webmaster tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics are also advised as these will give some insights into technical issues but remain quite limited on their own.

Think about the structure of your website as the basic foundation blocks and everything else is built upon this depends on a great foundation. Having poor structure can result negatively towards the web pages SEO you have spent hours or even days creating.

Some of the foundations include:

• Crawlability - A Clear unrestrictive path for crawls to move around your website without looping, hitting dead ends and clearly identifying if the pages should be indexed or not.
• Sitemap - Search engines can discover pages organically but having a sitemap can aid page discovery more quickly. Sitemaps can also include additional information for crawlers like page priority and went the page was last updated. Search engines only crawl a few pages each time they visit which is referred to as 'crawl budget'. Sitemaps can direct that valuable crawl budget to the pages that are most important to you and not some blog post from 4 years ago.
• Navigation - You may think that navigation is solely for end users but crawls will often use this as a way of finding pages so having effective navigation is great for everyone.
• URL Structure and click depth - URLs can often offer small insights into the relevancy of the page for both users and search engines. Having a clean organised URL structure is a positive signal. Click depth is often overlooked, it is important to make sure visitors don't have to click too many times to get to the important pages of your site. Having a high click depth signals to search engines that this isn't very important and that's why we keep it right at the back. 

The huge rise in mobile users browsing the web has prompted search engines like Google to prioritise mobile over desktop.

This now means your site could be amazing in desktop view but if slow, glitchy and overall poor on mobile your ranking will suffer as this is what you will primarily be scored on.

Some years back Google announced it was going mobile-first to inform webmasters this was going to become the norm.

Never overlook the importance of mobile responsiveness and ensure your site passes all the technical SEO points or your site may struggle with SEO visibility.

Google's aim is to deliver website results that offer the best answer for a search query and also give a great user experience when directed to a website.

Slow sluggish websites don't offer a good user experience and so for this reason Google will choose a close competitor over your site if this is the case.

Over recent years the number of page speed checks done by Google has increased, and they have raised the bar dramatically to push webmasters to optimise as much as possible. This includes things like 'content layer shift' to prevent objects from jumping around the screen as the page loads often causing users to hit the wrong button because it moved. 

Its widely reported that slow-loading pages cause high bounce rates as we live in a fast-paced world and waiting 6-10 seconds for a page to load is way too long.

If a page isn't in Google's index, it's basically not available to anyone using Google, so as you can imagine this is of huge importance to ensure all the pages you wish to be indexed are done so correctly.