If you are doing SEO for website, the first thing is to examine website thoroughly for technical issues. The technical issues should be crawling issues, indexing problems, duplicate pages, broken links etc. Website audit helps to identify what is going wrong and what need to be fixed.
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Webmaster Tools and Analytics
When you start the audit process, the first step is to make sure that the website is registered on webmaster tools of major search engines (Google, Bing etc.) and in Google Analytics or other website monitoring tools.
WMT is the easiest way to find out the issues and the general health of the site.
Keyword Analysis:
Using some keyword research tools like ubbersuggest.org to find out appropriate keywords for your website and target it to your website’s Meta tags and content. Then after monitor which keywords doing performing well for your website through Google Analytics.
URL Structure:
URLs describe a website or webpage to both search engines and visitors as well. Keeping them appropriate, compelling, and accurate is the key to position well in search engines.
The URLs need to obey the following rules:
• Make your URLs simpler and easy to remember.
• Make URL shorten as possible. Avoid using stop words, the fewer the words are more value each word receives from a search engine spider.
• Do not use CAPITALS words in URLs.
If your website does not succeed to fulfill these criteria, you may have to change them. If you do, make sure you redirect the old URL to the new URL to maintain any of the link juice streaming to that URL.
Website Meta Data:
1. Title Tag:
When I do an SEO audit, the first things I check is the <title> tag because title tag is the main text that describes a webpage and has the most SEO power of any tag on the page for establishing keyword relevance.
The Title Tag need to obey the following rules:
• Must be unique and not longer than 70 Characters
• If it makes sense, use the target keyword for that page twice.
• Title tags must be written to be descriptive of the content on the page.
2. Description Tag:
Meta description does not help in ranking, but it is extremely important to improve CTR (click through rate). Mata description should be compelling that a searcher will want to click.
The Description Tag need to obey the following rules:
• Meta descriptions on each page be unique and compelling
• Keep meta descriptions between 150 and 160 characters.
• Use the target keyword smartly in description that makes sense.
3. Heading Tags:
The heading tag H1, H2 and H3 are used to represent different sections of webpage content. It has an effect on both the SEO and usability of your website.
The Heading Tag need to obey the following rules:
• Heading tag should only contain text – no images please
• H1 tag is the main heading tag gives users a quick overview of the content.
• Place heading tags for each section that make sense.
Content:
Make sure there is enough content (should have minimum 300 words) across the webpage. Add some more content, if any of the pages don’t. Just add useful & engaging content that fulfill the needs of your real visitors.
Image Optimization:
Having “Alt tag” is must for every image. It describes image to search engines. You can use keyword that is relevant to the image because it has slight impact on search engine ranking. While doing audit, you should also take care of file size, file name and captions.
Rel=Nofollow Tag:
Use the nofollow tag on site wide external links, blog comments and anywhere else where you do not want to lose link juice. Using the nofollow attribute is one of the best ways of ensuring that your outgoing links doesn’t harm your website.
Sitemap:
Sitemap provides search engines spider to index all the pages on a site. Create sitemap and then submit it to search engine’s webmaster tools.
Redirects:
Redirect is a way to send users and search engine to a different URL. 301 redirect (permanent) and 302 redirect (temporary) are two types of redirects.
Duplicate Content:
Search engines don’t like duplicate content if it is sense less, keyword rich and low quality. Google’s panda algorithm especially works for identifying sites with duplicate content. There is one way to deal with is to rewrite the content.
Broken Links:
Broken links, whether internal or outbound, can hurt the usability of a website – which also can hurt SEO efforts. When crawling a website, if search engine spider comes across broken links, it will stop the crawling and indexing process and leave. If the search spider finds too many 404 error pages, it alerts a poor user experience, which decreases the value of the site.
Page Load Time:
Use Google page speed insights to identify solutions for page load speed. If the load time is high, there are a number of actions you can take, such as
• Browser caching
• Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
• Image optimization
• Minify JavaScript
Incoming Links:
Use some backlink checker tools to extract the data of inbound links. This will allow you to get a good idea of what kind of link-building activity that has been performed on the site.
Check link profiles one by one and search for spammy or low quality links. It may be that certain links are having a bad impact on the website’s capability to rank, and you may need to use the disavow tool.
Social Media Mentions:
Social signals have an effect on website ranking, and it is very important to evaluate the number of mentions the site has. Here are simple ways to increase the chances of acquiring social signals.
• Add social media sharing buttons on the site or on any blog posts
• Create content that is worthy of sharing, and reach out to people to ask for reviews.
Hope, that will help. And don’t forget to bookmark so that you can come back as and when you need to. Leave your comments below, if you have any comments.
