SEO website analysis: titles, canonicals, hreflang and indexing

An SEO website analysis of the on-page and indexing signals: titles and descriptions, headings, canonical, hreflang, structured data, robots.txt and sitemap.

SEO · Published: 13 October 2026 · 6 min read · Ольга Мирошник

Most SEO advice is about content and links. But before a search engine can weigh either, it has to fetch the page, understand what it is about and decide which address to index. An SEO website analysis of that layer — on-page markup and indexing signals — is the cheapest part of SEO to get right, and the part where one wrong line can cancel months of work.

What a crawler actually reads

A search robot does not see your design. It sees a status code, a <head> full of metadata, a heading outline and a set of links. In practice the signals that decide indexing fit on one screen:

• the HTTP status and any redirects on the way to the page;
• <title> and <meta name="description">;
• the H1 and the heading hierarchy below it;
• <link rel="canonical"> and <meta name="robots">;
• hreflang alternates for other languages;
• structured data and Open Graph;
• the site-wide files: robots.txt and sitemap.xml.

A useful analysis checks each of these on every page and, more importantly, checks that they agree with each other.

Titles, descriptions and headings

The title is still the strongest on-page signal and the headline of your search snippet. Keep it unique per page, put the main phrase near the start and stay within roughly 50–60 characters so it is not cut off. The description does not affect ranking directly, but it is what people read before clicking: 120–160 characters that answer "why this page".

Typical mistakes are boring and widespread: the same title on every product page, a description copied from the home page, an empty H1 or three H1s produced by a theme. Duplicates are the worst of them — when ten pages share one title, the search engine has to guess which one matters. More on the details in the meta tags guide.

Canonical: which copy to index

Almost every site serves the same content at several addresses: with and without a trailing slash, with ?utm_source=, sorted and filtered. The canonical tag names the version you want indexed. It only works if it points to a page that answers 200, on the same host, over HTTPS, and is not itself redirected or noindexed. A canonical that points into another language or to a redirect is worse than none. The full set of rules is in our article on canonical URLs.

hreflang and language versions

Multilingual sites add another layer: every language version should list all its alternates, including itself, and every link must be reciprocal. One-way hreflang, a code like en-UK instead of en-GB, or an alternate that leads to a redirect — and search engines quietly ignore the whole cluster. Add x-default for visitors whose language you do not cover. See the hreflang breakdown for working examples.

Structured data and Open Graph

Schema.org markup in JSON-LD does not move rankings by itself, but it makes the page eligible for rich results and helps both search engines and AI assistants understand what the page is: an article, a product, an organisation. Open Graph controls how the link looks when shared. Both must match the visible content — a product price in markup that differs from the page is a classic way to lose rich results. Details are in the structured data guide.

robots.txt, sitemap and noindex

These three decide what gets crawled and indexed at all. A Disallow: / left over from staging hides the whole site; see the robots.txt reference. The sitemap should list only canonical addresses that answer 200 — here is what the scan checks in it. And noindex needs a sanity check: on a cart or account page it is deliberate, on a category or article page it is an expensive mistake. Sitemap and robots.txt together explains how the pieces interact.

Running an SEO website analysis with SiteScan

1. Enter your domain on the home page — no sign-up needed. A free scan reads up to ten pages: the home page and the internal links found on it.
2. Open the SEO diagnostics block. It keeps apart findings that look alike but mean different things: intentional noindex (cart, search, account) versus mistaken noindex on content pages, missing canonicals, wrong ones and canonicals absent from the sitemap. For multilingual sites it lists hreflang without a link back, missing x-default, mismatched codes and duplicate titles, descriptions and H1s.
3. Check the Pages table: title, description, canonical, meta robots, hreflang, Open Graph and headings for each crawled page.
4. Look at Site checks → Indexing for robots.txt and the sitemap.
5. Fix, then press Rescan and compare.

If you need a quick routine rather than a deep dive, use the 15-minute SEO check; the server side of indexing — redirects, TLS, headers — is covered in the technical website audit.