How to drive organic traffic to the website? How to make website rank on Google? This is what every client looks for his website.
The first step to start working with a new client is to create SEO audit report for his website. The SEO consultants always undergo deep analysis to have a clear understanding of the client’s website.
This audit report helps to evaluate the current state of the client’s website and to plan out the strategy of implementation for the improvements. The report signifies the client’s succeeding, falling and mistake making.
Most of the clients don’t have extensive knowledge of SEO, so it’s your job to educate them. The audit report provides this bridge of knowledge.
The audit list should entitle the following information:
• List of all the SEO factors
• Describing each factor and its importance
• Verifying the client’s site with the standards
• Action plans needed to resolve the problem
The SEO audit can be broken into five larger sections:
1. Accessibility
2. Indexability
3. On-page ranking factors
4. Off-page ranking factors
5. Competitive analysis
Let’s take a deep dive into it.
1. Accessibility:
Your website may not be accessible due to a number of factors. Some of them are as follow:
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file enables you to restrict the search engine to crawl the certain pages of your website.
You can manually check the robots.txt file to make sure that it is not restricting the important pages of the website. To identify the blocked URL’s of the website, you can use Google Webmaster Tools.
Robots Meta Tags
The robots meta tags are used to guide the search engine crawlers if they are allowed to follow or index the specific web page.
For instance, consider an example:
<head>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />
</head>
In the above example, the robots meta tags prevent the search engine crawlers from indexing the page and following its links.
HTTP Status Codes
In this, the audit should report the occurrence of 4xx and 5xx status codes. The search engines and the users will not be able to access the website if these status code errors exist in the website. Make sure you check out for them.
XML Sitemaps
Your site’s XML sitemap provides a map for the search engine crawlers to make sure that they crawl all the site’s pages.
Few suggestions regarding the sitemaps:
• Make sure that it is well-formulated XML document. It must follow the sitemap protocol.
• Make sure that you submit the sitemap to your webmaster tools accounts.
• Keep it up to date. It must reflect all the latest changes.
Site Architecture
Your site architecture defines the user engagement and interaction. While evaluating the site’s architecture minimize the number of clicks to the important pages.
Keep the site’s hierarchy simple and user-friendly. Also, prioritize the important pages while optimizing the site’s architecture.
Take advantage of both horizontal and vertical depths.
Flash and JavaScript Navigation
It is recommended to avoid Flash and JavaScript since the search engine does not pay attention to such content for crawling.
Site Performance
The users pay very limited attention to the sites that take too long to load. The same goes for the search engine crawlers. The sites that load quickly are crawled more thoroughly and consistently than the slower ones.
2. Indexability:
After the accessibility analysis, we need to check the number of pages which are indexed after being crawling. Also, we need to frame solutions for the pages which have been crawled but not indexed.
Site: Command
The “site:” command is used to provide content for the specific site only. Most of the search engines support this command to get a rough idea of the number of pages being indexed by the given search engine.
The reported number of pages by the “site” command is rarely accurate. Still, a rough estimate can be extremely valuable. Since you know your site’s total page count, so estimated index count can identify the following three scenarios:
Search Engine Penalties
If your site is not being indexed till now, then you must check for the penalty. Here are 3 steps to help you fix the situation:
Step 1: Make sure that you have been actually penalized
Go through the entire accessibility and indexability tests to make sure that you have been actually penalized. If you are penalized, your pages will be completely deindexed or you will receive a penalty message in your webmaster tool account.
Step 2: Identify the reason(s) for the penalty:
Once you’re sure that you have been penalized, you need to analyze your entire website for the root cause of the penalty. If you have any formal message from the Search engine, then this step is complete.
Step 3: Fix the site’s penalized behavior
After you have identified the cause of penalty, you have to methodically fix it.
3. On-Page Ranking Factors
Till now we have indexed the accessibility and indexability of your site. Now it’s the time to move for the On-Page Ranking factors which count for the 50 percent of SEO activities.
URL
There are few points to consider when analyzing the URLs of the pages:
• Is the URL short and user-friendly?
• Does the URL include the relevant keywords?
• Is your URL using subfolders instead of subdomains?
• Does your URL avoid using excessive parameters?
• Are your URLs using hyphens to separate words?
Content
As rightly said that content is the king, let’s explore the following questions that can help you to guide the investigations:
• Does the page contain substantive content?
• Is the content valuable to its audience?
• Does the content contain targeted keywords? Do they appear in the first few paragraphs?
• Is the content spammy (e.g., keyword stuffing)?
• Does the content minimize spelling and grammatical errors?
• Is the content easily readable?
• Are search engines able to process the content?
HTML Markup
When it comes to on-page ranking factors, the HTML markup is the very first aspect for research and development.
There are a number of factors to consider when it comes to HTML markup. They are discussed as follows:
Title:
The page title appears in the search engine results. The page’s title the single most identifying characteristic that makes a web page unique.
While evaluating the page titles, you must consider the following points:
• Is the title expressed briefly and clearly?
• Does the page title describe the webpage content?
• Does the keyword contain targeted keywords?
Meta Descriptions:
The meta descriptions do not do not affect the ranking factor explicitly, but it affects the Click Through Rate (abbreviated as CTR) in the search engine results.
The meta description practices are almost identical to those for the titles.
Image Optimizations:
Although the images provide a lot for the visitors and a leading factor when it comes to engagement, for the search engines, the scenarios are totally opposite.
The search engines do not provide importance for images until they are not defined to them. For that, you need to provide the metadata for the images so that the search engine can use it for providing you a value.
The attributes to focus on includes the image’s alt text and image’s file name. Provide keywords for these attributes.
Outlinks:
An important part of the audit is to make sure that your site points to high-quality sites.
During the outbound analysis, keep the following points in your mind:
• Make sure that your site points to trustworthy sites.
• Our outbound links must be relevant to the page’s content.
• Include the relevant anchor text in the links. The anchor text must include targeted keywords.
• Scrap out broken links. This includes links with status code 4xx and 5xx.
• Avoid unnecessary redirection.
Other <body> tags
There are some more tags for emphasis. They are discussed below:
• Make sure that the page includes H1 tag. Include the targeted keywords in the H1 tag.
• Try to avoid frames and iframes.
• If using ads for a revenue source, make sure that ads don’t overpower your site’s content.
4. Off-Page Ranking Factors
Now that we have covered the on-page ranking factors, let’s have a look on the off-page ranking factors.
Popularity
The popular brands aren’t always popular. They gain popularity by influencing people and then attracting them. So for this reason, you must pay attention to the on gaining popularity.
When evaluating the popularity, you must answer the following question:
• Is your site gaining traffic? Check the stats from the website analytic tools for insights.
• Compare your site’s popularity with your competitors.
• Check for the backlinks from popular and sites with high PA and DA.
Backlink Profile
Your site’s quality is largely determined by the quality of the backlinks to your site. Therefore, it is extremely important to identify your site’s backlink profile to find the areas of improvement and new opportunities.
Here are some questions that your site’s backlink profile should answer:
• How many unique root domains are linking to your site? Suggestion: A link from 100 different root domains have more value than 100 links from the single root domain.
• Are your backlinks followed by the search engine crawler?
• Do your backlinks use different anchor text?
• Are the backlinks from the site that are typically relevant to your business?
• Are there any popular/trustworthy/authoritative root domains linking to your site?
Authority
A site’s authority is determined by the combination of factors such as quality and quantity of backlinks, its popularity, social media engagement etc.
To evaluate your site’s authority, SEOmoz provides two metrics to define it: Page Authority and Domain Authority.
The page authority predicts the how well a specific page will rank in search engine ranking and the domain authority predicts the performance of the entire domain.
Social Media Engagement
With the advent of social media platforms, the success of a website is largely dependent on its ability to gain social engagement.
Each social media platform has its own power. Facebook has likes, Twitter has retweets, Google+ has +1s and so on.
While analyzing your site’s social engagement, you look for the engagement using the platform tools.
5. Competitive Analysis
The entire process conducted above has to be repeated for your competitors. I know that it sounds painful, but the more you know about your competitors, the easier it will be to exploit their weakness.
So, this was all about how to audit the website for Search Engine Optimization.
For more details, visit us at www.evincedev.com
 |
| 5 Step SEO Audit Process |
The first step to start working with a new client is to create SEO audit report for his website. The SEO consultants always undergo deep analysis to have a clear understanding of the client’s website.
This audit report helps to evaluate the current state of the client’s website and to plan out the strategy of implementation for the improvements. The report signifies the client’s succeeding, falling and mistake making.
Most of the clients don’t have extensive knowledge of SEO, so it’s your job to educate them. The audit report provides this bridge of knowledge.
The audit list should entitle the following information:
• List of all the SEO factors
• Describing each factor and its importance
• Verifying the client’s site with the standards
• Action plans needed to resolve the problem
The SEO audit can be broken into five larger sections:
1. Accessibility
2. Indexability
3. On-page ranking factors
4. Off-page ranking factors
5. Competitive analysis
Let’s take a deep dive into it.
1. Accessibility:
Your website may not be accessible due to a number of factors. Some of them are as follow:
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file enables you to restrict the search engine to crawl the certain pages of your website.
You can manually check the robots.txt file to make sure that it is not restricting the important pages of the website. To identify the blocked URL’s of the website, you can use Google Webmaster Tools.
Robots Meta Tags
The robots meta tags are used to guide the search engine crawlers if they are allowed to follow or index the specific web page.
For instance, consider an example:
<head>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />
</head>
In the above example, the robots meta tags prevent the search engine crawlers from indexing the page and following its links.
HTTP Status Codes
In this, the audit should report the occurrence of 4xx and 5xx status codes. The search engines and the users will not be able to access the website if these status code errors exist in the website. Make sure you check out for them.
XML Sitemaps
Your site’s XML sitemap provides a map for the search engine crawlers to make sure that they crawl all the site’s pages.
Few suggestions regarding the sitemaps:
• Make sure that it is well-formulated XML document. It must follow the sitemap protocol.
• Make sure that you submit the sitemap to your webmaster tools accounts.
• Keep it up to date. It must reflect all the latest changes.
Site Architecture
Your site architecture defines the user engagement and interaction. While evaluating the site’s architecture minimize the number of clicks to the important pages.
Keep the site’s hierarchy simple and user-friendly. Also, prioritize the important pages while optimizing the site’s architecture.
Take advantage of both horizontal and vertical depths.
Flash and JavaScript Navigation
It is recommended to avoid Flash and JavaScript since the search engine does not pay attention to such content for crawling.
Site Performance
The users pay very limited attention to the sites that take too long to load. The same goes for the search engine crawlers. The sites that load quickly are crawled more thoroughly and consistently than the slower ones.
2. Indexability:
After the accessibility analysis, we need to check the number of pages which are indexed after being crawling. Also, we need to frame solutions for the pages which have been crawled but not indexed.
Site: Command
The “site:” command is used to provide content for the specific site only. Most of the search engines support this command to get a rough idea of the number of pages being indexed by the given search engine.
The reported number of pages by the “site” command is rarely accurate. Still, a rough estimate can be extremely valuable. Since you know your site’s total page count, so estimated index count can identify the following three scenarios:
- The index and actual page count is roughly equivalent: This is the absolute case. This means that the search engine is successfully crawling and indexing your site’s pages.
- The index count is significantly smaller than the actual count: This is the case when the search engine is not indexing your site’s pages. In such a scenario, check your site against accessibility tests. Also, check if the site is being penalized by the search engines.
- The index count is significantly larger than the actual count: This case signifies that the site is serving the duplicate content (e.g. page accessible through multiple entry points).
Search Engine Penalties
If your site is not being indexed till now, then you must check for the penalty. Here are 3 steps to help you fix the situation:
Step 1: Make sure that you have been actually penalized
Go through the entire accessibility and indexability tests to make sure that you have been actually penalized. If you are penalized, your pages will be completely deindexed or you will receive a penalty message in your webmaster tool account.
Step 2: Identify the reason(s) for the penalty:
Once you’re sure that you have been penalized, you need to analyze your entire website for the root cause of the penalty. If you have any formal message from the Search engine, then this step is complete.
Step 3: Fix the site’s penalized behavior
After you have identified the cause of penalty, you have to methodically fix it.
3. On-Page Ranking Factors
Till now we have indexed the accessibility and indexability of your site. Now it’s the time to move for the On-Page Ranking factors which count for the 50 percent of SEO activities.
URL
There are few points to consider when analyzing the URLs of the pages:
• Is the URL short and user-friendly?
• Does the URL include the relevant keywords?
• Is your URL using subfolders instead of subdomains?
• Does your URL avoid using excessive parameters?
• Are your URLs using hyphens to separate words?
Content
As rightly said that content is the king, let’s explore the following questions that can help you to guide the investigations:
• Does the page contain substantive content?
• Is the content valuable to its audience?
• Does the content contain targeted keywords? Do they appear in the first few paragraphs?
• Is the content spammy (e.g., keyword stuffing)?
• Does the content minimize spelling and grammatical errors?
• Is the content easily readable?
• Are search engines able to process the content?
HTML Markup
When it comes to on-page ranking factors, the HTML markup is the very first aspect for research and development.
There are a number of factors to consider when it comes to HTML markup. They are discussed as follows:
Title:
The page title appears in the search engine results. The page’s title the single most identifying characteristic that makes a web page unique.
While evaluating the page titles, you must consider the following points:
• Is the title expressed briefly and clearly?
• Does the page title describe the webpage content?
• Does the keyword contain targeted keywords?
Meta Descriptions:
The meta descriptions do not do not affect the ranking factor explicitly, but it affects the Click Through Rate (abbreviated as CTR) in the search engine results.
The meta description practices are almost identical to those for the titles.
Image Optimizations:
Although the images provide a lot for the visitors and a leading factor when it comes to engagement, for the search engines, the scenarios are totally opposite.
The search engines do not provide importance for images until they are not defined to them. For that, you need to provide the metadata for the images so that the search engine can use it for providing you a value.
The attributes to focus on includes the image’s alt text and image’s file name. Provide keywords for these attributes.
Outlinks:
An important part of the audit is to make sure that your site points to high-quality sites.
During the outbound analysis, keep the following points in your mind:
• Make sure that your site points to trustworthy sites.
• Our outbound links must be relevant to the page’s content.
• Include the relevant anchor text in the links. The anchor text must include targeted keywords.
• Scrap out broken links. This includes links with status code 4xx and 5xx.
• Avoid unnecessary redirection.
Other <body> tags
There are some more tags for emphasis. They are discussed below:
• Make sure that the page includes H1 tag. Include the targeted keywords in the H1 tag.
• Try to avoid frames and iframes.
• If using ads for a revenue source, make sure that ads don’t overpower your site’s content.
4. Off-Page Ranking Factors
Now that we have covered the on-page ranking factors, let’s have a look on the off-page ranking factors.
Popularity
The popular brands aren’t always popular. They gain popularity by influencing people and then attracting them. So for this reason, you must pay attention to the on gaining popularity.
When evaluating the popularity, you must answer the following question:
• Is your site gaining traffic? Check the stats from the website analytic tools for insights.
• Compare your site’s popularity with your competitors.
• Check for the backlinks from popular and sites with high PA and DA.
Backlink Profile
Your site’s quality is largely determined by the quality of the backlinks to your site. Therefore, it is extremely important to identify your site’s backlink profile to find the areas of improvement and new opportunities.
Here are some questions that your site’s backlink profile should answer:
• How many unique root domains are linking to your site? Suggestion: A link from 100 different root domains have more value than 100 links from the single root domain.
• Are your backlinks followed by the search engine crawler?
• Do your backlinks use different anchor text?
• Are the backlinks from the site that are typically relevant to your business?
• Are there any popular/trustworthy/authoritative root domains linking to your site?
Authority
A site’s authority is determined by the combination of factors such as quality and quantity of backlinks, its popularity, social media engagement etc.
To evaluate your site’s authority, SEOmoz provides two metrics to define it: Page Authority and Domain Authority.
The page authority predicts the how well a specific page will rank in search engine ranking and the domain authority predicts the performance of the entire domain.
Social Media Engagement
With the advent of social media platforms, the success of a website is largely dependent on its ability to gain social engagement.
Each social media platform has its own power. Facebook has likes, Twitter has retweets, Google+ has +1s and so on.
While analyzing your site’s social engagement, you look for the engagement using the platform tools.
5. Competitive Analysis
The entire process conducted above has to be repeated for your competitors. I know that it sounds painful, but the more you know about your competitors, the easier it will be to exploit their weakness.
So, this was all about how to audit the website for Search Engine Optimization.
For more details, visit us at www.evincedev.com
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Actually few days back, i was worried because i was not getting good traffic on my website then i saw an article on 7 Ways To Keep Visitors On Your Website For Longer (Part 1).
This article helped me a lot in getting extra traffic on my website and in keeping visitors for longer.
So i am sharing here, as i found your article too very helpful for me and for many.
And yes website audit is also very important to drive more and relevent traffic on your website."