In order to pass this test you must create a sitemap.xml file for your website. Some of the best practices are listed below:

• It is strongly recommended that you place your sitemap at the root directory of your website: http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml But in some situations, you may want to produce different sitemaps for different paths on your site (e.g., security permission issues)
• Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. This means that if your site contains more than 50,000 URLs or your sitemap is bigger than 10MB, you must create multiple sitemap files and use a Sitemap index file
• All URLs listed in the sitemap must reside on the same host as the sitemap. For instance, if the sitemap is located at http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml, it can't include URLs from http://subdomain.yourwebsite.com
• Once you have created your sitemap, let search engines know about it by submitting directly to them, pinging them, or adding the sitemap location to your robots.txt file
• Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip, reducing bandwidth consumption

sitemap.xml example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
 <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com</loc>
 <lastmod>2013-01-01</lastmod>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
 <priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com/articles/100</loc>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com/articles/101</loc>
 <lastmod>2013-01-02</lastmod>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.com/articles/102</loc>
 <lastmod>2013-01-02T13:00:12+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

In order to pass this test you must create an account on Google Analytics site and insert into your page a small javascript tracking code.

Example:

<!-- Google Analytics -->
<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

ga('create', 'UA-XXXX-Y', 'auto');
ga('send', 'pageview');

</script>
<!-- End Google Analytics -->

Note that you have to change the 'UA-XXXX-Y' with the proper id which you'll find in your analytics account.

Your two options for file compression are Deflate and GZIP.

• Deflate is an option which comes automatically with the Apache server and which is simple to set up.
• GZIP on the other hand needs to be installed and requires a bit more work to install. However, GZIP does achieve a higher compression rate and therefore might be a better choice if your website uses pages which have a lot of images or large file sizes.

Setting up file compression for your website will depend on which type of server you're using for your website. Most likely, you'll be using Apache, which means you can enable compression by adding a few deflate codes to your .htaccess file.

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

For more advanced information regarding deflate you can check this Apache documentation.

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive on
 
    ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 month"
   </IfModule>

In order to pass this test you must consider using a 301 re-write rule in your .htaccess file so that both addresses (http://example.com and http://www.example.com) resolve to the same URL.

- If you want to redirect http://www.example.com to http://example.com, you can use this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/example\.com\/" [R=301,L]

- If you want to redirect http://example.com to http://www.example.com, you can use this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Note that you must put the above lines somewhere after RewriteEngine On line.

Creating a custom 404 error page can be relatively simple or more complicated, depending on what technologies were used to build your website (your web server, framework used, etc). Learn more about the basics of creating a custom 404 error page.

On your custom error page, you should provide relevant information to keep the user's attention so they remain on your website. Some steps to achieve this goal include:

• Adding links to your most important pages (your best articles articles/content, latest posts, etc.)
• If you have an e-commerce business, you can display special offers, product recommendations, discounts, etc.
• Include a search box or a sitemap link to help users find the information they wanted.
• Use simple language (non-technical) to explain what went wrong.
• Add a contact form or provide an email address to allow users to get in touch with you for further help.

You can also use your custom 404 error page to track the source of broken links in your site.