Search engines are always evolving to evade those who want to game their system and rank high for certain keywords, regardless of whether their content serves the interest of the person performing the search. Understanding the rules of the road ensures your website doesn't rank poorly or get removed from any index. Some fundamental tools used across the industry will help you produce reliable website audits and follow best practices. I also have a suggestion about which WordPress plugin I think performs the best.
Web Browser Tools
The major browsers all come with tools that you can use to help you in developing your website. They can also help you with website audits. Right-click an open area of a web page and select "Inspect". These tools can help you debug Javascript, refine your CSS, and test performance. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have Lighthouse built into their DevTools. Firefox users can add the Lighthouse extension. Lighthouse can provide insights into various SEO factors, as well as performance grades.
SEOPress Audits
SEOPress is a WordPress plugin that has extremely thorough website audit tools and also has a link scanning bot that will identify links, link text, and HTTP response for those links. It is an essential tool for a website with a blog as blogs often carry links that can become stale. In the video for this blog post, I show the options for the audit, and link bot, and how to run them.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing webmaster tools provide information on how the Bing search engine sees your website. You can't get any more authoritative data than that. Bing Webmaster Tools also provides some SEO feedback that you don't find in a lot of tools, like proper heading structure. This is not an alternative to Google Search Console but should be used as one of the primary tools in your website audit toolkit.
Google Search Console
Google is still the dominant search engine so this is one of the go-to tools for auditing your website SEO. Google has unique search features and to help you refine your SEO for those features, Google Search Console provides unique insights into things like their Discovery feature.
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