The first step in SEO audit is to look for Indexing issues. If your website is not indexed, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines cannot see it, and thus your website will have no ranking.

So in order to be ranked, your website must be indexed first.

There are plenty of tools (Free or Paid) that will help you to determine whether your website is indexed or not as part of SEO audit.

A quick way to to see if your website is indexed or not, is to use Google’s search operator  site: followed by domain name,  site:breaze8.com in Google’s search box. This will show you all pages indexed by Google for your website or domain.

When a page is not indexed

If your website or particular page is not being indexed by search engines, the most common issue is the meta robots tag being used on a page or incorrectly configured robots.txt file to disallow indexing.

Both the meta tag, which affects page level, and the robots.txt file which provide instructions to search engine indexing robots on how to deal with content on your page or website.

The difference is that the robots meta tag appears on an individual or single page(s), while the robots.txt file provides guidance or instructions for the site as a whole. On the robots.txt file, you can omit page(s) or directories and how the robots should treat these parts of your website while indexing it.

Google Search Console also has a great robots.txt Tester tool, it will help you identify errors in your robots file. You can also test a page on your website to see if your robots file in its current state is blocking Googlebot from indexing your page.