How to Properly Audit your Website for SEO
If you have had a website for many years but have never really paid much attention to its efficiency in the search engines and you have recently started exploring optimizing your website, here are some areas you can look at prior to audit the current SEO state of your website.
Source Code: By right clicking on a page you will have an option that reads source code. This will show you all you’re coding for that specific page. If you look at the top of the coding you will be able to see your meta title tag, meta description and meta keywords targeted for that specific page. Take a look at your keywords, do they seem generic? Are there more than 5 or 6 keywords in this section? Does your meta tag look like it could use improvement? If you answered yes to any of these questions is might be time to optimizing your website.
Content: Do you have enough content on your website? Typically the pages that are most important should always have 150-200 words of text to make them sticky in the search engines. It is always important to write this content for humans, your visitors and audiences reading your site. DO NOT WRITE CONTENT FOR THE SEARCH ENGINES! Additionally your content should always have a handful of targeted keywords spread tastefully throughout the content in order to be fully efficient and optimized. If you want to be found online you will need to have ample text on your website.
Images: Take a look at the URL of where your image is being hosted. Is it a sloppy URL structure? You always want the URL structure of your image to be describing exactly what your image actually is. Don’t try stuffing it with keywords that don’t apply to your image just keep it natural to what is occurring in the photo. When you hover over your image what does your alt tag show? It should always be a description of what is occurring in your image as well, this way your images will start to rank in the image search section for when people search for images.
URL Structures: Avoiding your URL structures could lead to very poor SEO results for your website. Same principals should apply to your URL structures as they do throughout your website. They should clearly label what is occurring on that page. If you’re URL structures linger with many different characters and numbers you are not maximizing the potential of those URL structures.
For example:
A web page dedicated towards red sneakers should look like www.websitexyz.com/red-sneakers.
These little areas often times get over looked by business website owners. If these areas of your website are not yet fully optimized to their potential, your website is not going to run as optimal and efficient as possible for your audience.
10 Responses to “How to Properly Audit your Website for SEO”
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I get what you mean by this article. Meta tags, contents, alt tags for images, and URL optimization, all these are the most basic but important factors that affect your rankings.
Really great post – many thanks.
Very good advice for those who are just launching themselves in the SEO world! These are probably some of the first things one needs to pay attention to when managing a website’s SEO performance.
Hi SysComm,
Thanks for reading and your comment!
Good stuff. In first paragraph, you reference keywords. I had seen in many articles that they were no longer factored in the algorithms. Are they back in style?
Hi Jim,
Thanks for your comment and your question.
Conducting keyword research and optimizing naturally keyword phrases based on the existing content for each page of website is still a great best practice and has never really gone out of style…
Hi Nick,
I’ve been lurking your newsletter for awhile now wondering if it’s worth keeping the subscription. Yes it is! As a small business owner, I’m left doing many things I was heretofore unqualified for. Thanks for brining me up to speed and I look forward to being able to hire you!
Hi Felecia,
Thanks for reading my blog and newsletter! Please let me know if there is anything in the future that I might be able to help you with…thanks again
I appreciate this topic, I was learning to optimize my web pages back in 1995 before anyone knew what they were doing, this article has good info and it’s good to be reminded now and again to go back to basics.
Hi Michael,
The SEO basics should remain the same as many other aspects continue to evolve. Thanks for reading!