Easy List of Dos and Don'ts for Your Website
1. Pick your exact URL format and stick with it throughout the site.
Which url format are you going to choose for all of the webpages on your website? Option 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? There are many more than this, too.
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www.example.com, www.example.com/home, www.example.com/about, www.example.com/contact-us
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example.com, example.com/home, example.com/about, example.com/contact-us
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http://example.com, http://example.com/home, http://example.com/about, http://example.com/contact-us
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http://www.example.com, http://www.example.com/home, http://www.example.com/about, http://www.example.com/contact-us
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https://example.com, https://example.com/home, https://example.com/about, https://example.com/contact-us
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It is important that you NOT have a variety of url formats on different pages on your website.
(The url format one chooses is commonly referred to in website literature as the "canonical url."
2. Avoid repeating content on multiple pages on your website.
2. Avoid repeating content on multiple pages on your website.
2. Avoid repeating content on multiple pages on your website.
You'll go down in ranking if you do this too often.
Search engines (Google, Bing, etc) frown on websites that repeat the same content on multiple pages. It is seen as a cheap and lazy way to deceive their algorithms into thinking that you are producing a lot of content on your topic on your website.
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You can use www.siteliner.com to scan your website to find out how much of your content is repeated on other pages on your site.
3. Make sure all of your links (hyperlinks) on your website work properly.
Links that don't work are called "broken links," and they will absolutely harm your search engine ranking.
So, always be sure that your hyperlinks (either to other pages on your website or to other websites) are working properly.
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Tools you can use to find out if you have any broken links on your website:
wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker
wordpress.org/plugins/404-redirection
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