Search engines use the meta title tags to determine the topic of your webpage content. These title tags are the text that the search engine users see as the title of your webpages.

Meta title tags are usually the first thing that search engine users see in the search engine results. The users often decide in a fraction of a second whether to click on your link or not. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that a good meta title tag captures the essence of your webpage content. A good title tag, with the right keywords, can increase the relevance of your content to different search queries and hence, improve your page ranking.

However, the title tags should not be misleading in nature. Otherwise, it will seriously bring down your click-through rates, which negatively affects your page ranking.

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Meta Descriptions provide a concise summary of your webpage content to the search engine users. Meta descriptions appear right below the clickable links in the search engine results, which are meta title tags, by the way.

Search engines have stopped directly using meta descriptions in their rankings. But, most of the search engine users glance at the meta description content before they click on the links. Therefore, they continue to be relevant and useful. A good description is not too long, because search engines only display meta descriptions up to a certain word limit on the results page. Also, the text in them should be designed for the readers and not for the search engines.

If your readers find relevant content in meta descriptions, more of them will click on your link in the results page, which improves your relevance for the respective search keywords. Also, if your meta descriptions are on point, then your click-through rate will also improve. Therefore, meta descriptions continue to be relevant indirectly for your search engine rankings.

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Headings are meta tags that give structure to your webpage. The headings range from H1 to H6. H1 is the main heading of your webpage, which is usually the title. Then, H2 is the subheading, H3 is sub-subheading, and so it goes.

Headings help the search engines easily understand the main topics of your post, which is essential when you have posts longer than 1000 words. In the age of HTML5, the headings have relatively lost their earlier dominance, but they still continue to be important for page rankings. Optimal use of relevant keywords in the headings is known to improve search engine rankings significantly.

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Sitemap, as the name indicates, is a map of your website. You create a single XML file, which captures the complete structure of your website – lists URLs to all of your website’s pages, displays the links between them, and even shares meta data of your webpages with the search engines. This makes it extremely easy for the search engines to crawl your website entirely.

Sitemap is one of the most useful and powerful tools for your website. Its benefits are many. For instance, search engines may not be able to find some of your webpages, because they are not linked to other pages on your website. A sitemap helps the search engines index such pages too. Sitemap shares meta data such as the type of content located at some links (video, audio, etc.), the age appropriateness of such content, and a lot more. Also, if you make any changes to your website like add new pages, delete some pages, and so on, search engines can easily discover this using sitemaps, which makes the indexing process faster.

The importance of sitemaps is utmost for large websites with many webpages, new websites that have few backlinks, websites that feature lots of rich content like media, and websites that are not structured properly. In all of these cases, properly designed sitemaps make sure that search engines can index your pages as easily as possible. After all, your webpages will appear in the search results and be ranked by the search engines only if they are indexed.

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The Robots section is for the exact opposite purpose of the Sitemap section. Your Robots.txt file is a text file that tells the search engines which webpages should not be indexed. It should be noted that this file does not force the search engines from indexing your webpages, but merely inform them. Search engines can simply dismiss the instructions from Robots.txt. In other words, although most search engines listen to the instructions from Robots.txt, they are not bound by it.

Robots.txt is one way of ensuring that your website’s sensitive content does not appear in the search engine results. However, the only effective way of ensuring complete security of your sensitive content is to avoid putting it on the website.

That being said, there are times when you may need to use Robots.txt. One such instance is when you have created new pages for an upcoming event or a product launch and those webpages need to go live only after a specific date. You can use Robots.txt in such cases to prevent search engines from indexing your pages until that date arrives. Another instance is when your server bandwidth is low, and you do not wish to choke it with crawling. In such cases, you can use Robots.txt to prevent the search engines from indexing heavy images, videos, and other huge files for the time being.

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In the Blocking Factor section, you can see different factors that are adding overhead on your website loading. In other words, you can check what is affecting the loading speed of your website in the Blocking Factor section. Typically, the use of flash, frames or some plugins is the cause of overhead on your website.

Loading speed is a powerful factor that affects the user experience of your visitors. Loading speed is the amount of time it takes for your website to load on the user’s device. That could be your home page, sales page, landing page, or any other page. The longer it takes for your webpage to load, the more restless the users get. Mind you, most of them simply don’t bother to wait, when the entire internet is waiting for them. They’ll simply quit your website and go to another site. So, you lose precious visitors. More visitors leaving your website after clicking on your link means lower click-through rate, which directly affects your search engine ranking.

You can improve the loading speed by making your web page heavy. Apart from getting rid of flash, frames, and heavy plugins, you can also remove high-resolution images, or at least compress them to decrease their size.

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The Blog section lists direct links to all the blog articles you have created on your website. In today’s digital era, blogs form an important component of audience-outreach system viz. the social media. Blogs offer value to your audience and give them a strong reason to visit your website regularly.

For consumer-oriented businesses, it is crucial that they have a strong social media presence. It is not enough to just create a social media page and spend thousands of dollars on social media ads. In order to engage your audience with your business or website, you need to offer them value. Whatever you offer should be valuable enough to check your social media pages, follow them, and even visit your website. Blog articles are a powerful tool to achieve all of this without spending anything. These blog articles can be shared on social media to expand their reach. The more your audience reads your blog articles, engages with your brand, and visits your website, the more trust you develop in the market.

The Blog section helps you track and manage all your blog posts to ensure that you are reaching the maximum audience with your social media strategy.

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Page Speed is another impressive tool to help you improve your visitor’s user experience on your website. It will display the time taken for your webpages to load, and also the size of the web pages.

If the Page Load Time (as displayed under the Page Speed section) of the web pages is high, then it means that the users are being made to wait for longer durations until their pages load. The other metric, ‘Page Size,' denotes the size of the page. The lower the Page Size, the faster will increase your web page load. Together, the two metrics give you a good idea of how slow or fast your webpage is loading.

The metrics are also accompanied by average page load time and average page size. These averages offer a lot more information than what is immediately obvious. If your page load time is well below the world average, and your page size is also well below the global average, then the problem could be the server where your website is hosted. Perhaps, your website is receiving more traffic that what its server is capable of handling efficiently. Thus, this section is crucial for analyzing and improving the user experience of your website visitors.

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In this section, you can check all the links that are leading out of your web page. There are two types of links on your web page – internal links and external links. Internal links are necessary to help your website visitors navigate through your site easily. External links take your visitors away from your site. They could be leading to your social media pages, sister sites, reference content, or to other websites. In the In-page Links section, you can monitor all of them.

An excessive number of links on your web page can drive down its credibility in the eyes of the search engines, irrespective of whether they are external or internal links.

Further, if you have enabled comments on your website or blog, the regular analysis could be necessary to ensure that your commentators are not posting spam links to spam websites. Such links can drastically bring down your website’s credibility from the search engines’ perspective.

Similarly, if your web pages have internal links leading to pages that are broken, removed, or whose URLs have not been updated, then it affects the overall SEO score of your website. Addressing them on an urgent basis is necessary. Those links can be easily found in the In-page Links section.

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In this section, you can check the percentage of file requests received by various types of files. If your web page has some files listed on it, then every time you load that web page, the browser sends a separate request for those individual files to load. The more files of a specific type are listed on the web page, the more is the number of requests received by the file type. As the number of files to be loaded on a web page increases, the size of the web page increases, which in turn increases your page load time, and leads to a bad user experience.

Usually, the culprits are images, CSS, and JavaScript. The file requests received by CSS and JavaScript can be reduced significantly by making use of minifying and concatenating techniques. Similarly, images can be optimized by a variety of techniques, which minimize the size of the images downloaded on the browser. Otherwise, the user’s browser will be left downloading a multitude of files simultaneously. Naturally, this is a time-consuming process and the users will hop to another website that is faster and easier to use. Employing the file request reduction techniques is crucial for improved user experience, which brings and keeps more visitors on your website.

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Missing Alts provides a list of all the images on your web pages, along with the information about whether or not they have ALT texts associated with them. ALT text is the text description for each of your images, which makes it possible for the search engine crawlers to identify the content in the images.

Search engine crawlers are amazing at recognizing, understanding, and indexing text content from your website. But, they are not capable of recognizing your images. While they can index them, they sure will not know what those images are. In the event that search engine users are looking for images related to your website topic, then the search engine will not know to give them your image, no matter how perfectly your image matches their search query.

ALT texts prevent all of this from happening. Your ALT text for each image should accurately describe what is in the image in as few words as possible. ALT text is not to be confused with a caption. The caption is what you use to recognize internally on your WordPress platform or your servers. Better ALT text means better crawling by search engines, which means better page rankings. So, if you see any links to images in the Missing ALTs section, then add ALT text to them immediately.

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Here, you can check a variety of information regarding the web server where your website is hosted. It provides you with general server information like Nameserver, server status, the server’s IP address, and even the geographical location of the server, down to the city.

You can regularly check whether your server is up and running smoothly or not. If your customers or visitors are having a problem accessing your website, then this is the first place you check for more information. If the Server Status is showing as Up/Running, and your website users are still finding it hard to access it, then it could be because of many factors such as slow internet speed of the user, low bandwidth of the server and high website traffic, and so on.

Your server’s location and its speed are also crucial for the search engines. For any reason, if your website users are having a bad experience on your site, then Google is smart enough to recognize that and lower your search engine rankings. Therefore, your web server should always be up and running, have good bandwidth, and hosted on a trustworthy server.

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This section offers you all the basic information you need about your domain name. Domain name is the human-readable address of your website, which the users can use to visit your website. It has very little effect on your website’s Google rankings, but try to purchase a second-hand domain as it drives more traffic than a fresh domain.

Once the domain is registered, you check the registrar name, which is basically the agency with which your domain name is currently parked. You can also check out the contact details you have shared with the registrar, including your or your company’s name, address, and phone number. You will even find the information on when your particular domain was first created under the Domain Created heading. If you purchased your domain from a previous owner, then the Domain Created head will display the time when the domain was created for the first time. Further, a Domain Expiry head will provide you information on when the domain will expire.

Domain Privacy is another important feature in the Domain Registration section. It displays whether your domain privacy has been enabled or disabled. If you wish to keep the contact details that you shared with the domain registrar private, then you should enable domain privacy.

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Backlinks are the links that bring visitors from other websites to your websites. So, logically having more backlinks translates to more customers, right? Not really! Backlinks work exactly like letters of recommendation. In the case of recommendation letters, it is not only the content of the letters that matters, but also the person who is making the recommendation. This is true for backlinks as well.

If backlinks to your website are being featured on another site, then your website’s search engine ranking will improve or fall, depend on that website’s ranking. If you happen to have backlinks on websites that search engines recognize as SEO offenders who use black hat SEO tricks, or on websites that are irrelevant to your website’s content altogether, then search engines will punish the site by dropping the rankings.

Backlinks are among the most important SEO tools, as they have a direct effect on your search engine ranking. Once you have set up backlinks on the internet, you can analyze the number of visitors you are getting from different sources (websites hosting your backlinks) using the Backlinks tool.

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Alexa is a website popularity tracking service that was acquired by Amazon. It offers a variety of metrics and statistics to understand the popularity of a website. Its most popular metric being “Alexa Rank”, which ranks the sites according to the number of visitors they attract. It might not be possible for most users to plow through a multitude of these metrics and numbers. Therefore, the Alexa section here simplifies everything and presents to the user in an easily understandable format.

The Alexa section simply displays the popularity of your website as low, medium or high. This saves you precious time that you would instead have spent on understanding a multitude of Alexa metrics. The Alexa ranking is useful because it helps you track the SEO performance of your website on a global scale.

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