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Why lately our search engines just don’t seem to deliver results.
Guest: Jason Koebler, cofounder of 404 Media and co-host of the 404 Media Podcast.
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Every Friday, Slate’s popular daily news podcast What Next brings you TBD, a clear-eyed look into the future. From fake news to fake meat, algorithms to augmented reality, Lizzie O’Leary is your guide to the tech industry and the world it’s creating for us to live in.
Lizzie O’Leary is the host of What Next: TBD, Slate’s show about technology, power, and the future. Previously, she created and hosted Marketplace Weekend. She has reported for CNN, Bloomberg News, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She is also a contributing writer at the Atlantic.
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Search Engine Land » SEO » 11 essential SEO elements you should be tracking
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By now, you may have encountered SEO dashboards, such as those from Screaming Frog, which sync with Looker Studio. Perhaps you use an enterprise tool to track your technical SEO in the cloud.
That’s all fine, but how helpful is it really?
If you said yes, then great! I’m happy for you.
But if you, like the rest of us, wish there was a better way, there is! 
The key is to be more targeted and intentional about what and which pages we track. 
This article dives into what is truly essential to track and how to track each. I’ll also cover helpful paid tools for tracking SEO elements. (I’m not affiliated with these companies, but I am a customer of a few.) 
Tracking your site’s indexability is crucial. It should be at the top of your list. If your site isn’t indexable, all your efforts are wasted. 
In this section, I’ll explain the key indexability factors that affect your visibility on Google and how to track them.
The robots.txt file is the first file that search engines look at when crawling your website. This simple file provides instructions on how bots should crawl a website.
What do we track?
Every SEO should track changes to the robots.txt file, especially if it starts blocking search engines. 
Many tools offer this feature, but it’s important to set up email alerts to notify you if the file blocks search engines.
A common reason this happens is when developers push a site from staging to production and accidentally transfer the robots.txt file.
This occurs when all files are pushed live instead of just the updated ones.
What tools to use
While I’m prone to building custom Python tools for tasks, why reinvent the wheel here? Several low-cost tools work great for validating your robots.txt file.
I prefer LittleWarden for this task because it lets you track specific changes or general indexability checks and send email alerts. You can set it to check daily or hourly.
However, Visualping (which I used in this knowledge graph case study) is also an excellent choice for tracking robots.txt changes.
Ah, the infamous noindex tag. This is a meta robots tag you can add to pages you don’t want indexed in Google, like login, account or other low-value pages. 
If you have pages you absolutely need indexed or not indexed, tracking changes to your configuration is vital to your SEO health.
What tools to use
LittleWarden is great for this because you can customize settings for each page, allowing you to easily set most pages to be indexable while marking a few as noindex. 
Tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb can also work, but they require more setup.
Simply put, the x-robots-tag does the same thing as the noindex meta tag, but instead of being in the <head> of your website, it shows up in the HTTP response headers.
What tools to use
LittleWarden is pre-configured to check your HTTP response headers for any indexability issues that might happen, including canonical tag changes.
XML sitemaps are another powerful SEO tool. These files contain a map of all of the links on our sites. 
Google uses these as strong hints for pages they should discover and add to their crawl queue. 
If your sitemap has errors (e.g., fetch or parse fails), Google will keep attempting to process it for a few days. If the attempts persistently fail, Google will stop trying to crawl the URL.
What tools to use
LittleWarden wins again with its ease of use for tracking changes to your XML sitemaps and ensuring their validity. 
Canonical tags are an often misunderstood and misused element in SEO. 
While Google only treats these as hints and not strict directives (like noindex), it’s still important to track whether they’re changed on a page.
What tools to use
LittleWarden can track this, but you can also use tools like ChangeTower or VisualPing. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb can track it too, but setting up email alerts requires extra steps.
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On-page SEO elements refer to factors on your pages that users and search engines can see.
If you’re in local SEO, you might not encounter many site changes. However, when you add more team members with site access, someone may inadvertently make marketing changes that could affect your rankings.
This is why tracking on-page elements is crucial.
Heading tags are any text that is formatted using formal heading HTML (<h1>,<h2>,<h3>, etc.). There has been some debate over how Google uses these.
Google reps say they don’t matter that much for rankings, but they do for accessibility. 
Many SEOs, including myself, believe that a well-optimized H1 and heading structure can improve rankings, but that’s a discussion for another time. 
For now, it’s important to track changes to your H1 tags on your most important pages.
What tools to use
This is where the variety of tools we can use really opens up. You can test out any of the following below with reliable consistency:
Again, you can technically use Screaming Frog and Sitebulb, but configuring email alerts from this will be a pain. 
Tracking changes to your internal links can be critical to maintaining a strong internal link graph. 
If a well-placed internal link with optimized anchor text gets removed or changed, it could affect your rankings.
Will it affect it a lot? Probably not. But are you really willing to test that out for us?
What tools to use
Tracking changes to your keyword usage on your site is vital to your SEO success. 
If another marketer on your team tries their hand at sprucing up your content, they could unknowingly tank your rankings for your page.
What tools to use
Tracking how you appear in the SERP may not directly affect your rankings, but it could affect your organic click-thru rates (CTR). 
Title tags are the code we provide to search engines that suggest what we think our displayed title should be.
Yes, Google changes title tags, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore them.
What tools to use
Meta descriptions may be one of the most contentious topics in SEO. Some things that make this such an interesting topic include, but are certainly not limited to:
However, if you’re already tracking unintended changes to your site, clicking the meta description box is worth the extra second. 
What tools to use
Schema markup is a powerful tool. It can send important structured data to Google and help us create interesting SERP features for our results.
Creating and implementing schema markup takes time, so it’s important to track any changes, especially since SERP features can boost your organic CTR.
What tools to use
Now that you have your comprehensive list of SEO elements to track, it’s time to add some robust monitoring for your SEO campaigns. 
Trust me, it’s better to be prepared than to find out about a change that happened days later. 
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Are featured snippets still important? How AI overview impacts SEO strategy  Fast Company
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