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Quick Website SEO Audit Recommendations

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

If you are not sure how to spot an un-optimized website just yet, don’t worry at all because all it really takes is conducting a visual glance in a variety of locations on the website. Many people still seem to think that you have to get into the coding and do deep technical analysis in order to find out if a site is optimized. In reality, all you have to do is look.

Meta and Title Tag Information
Your meta tag sits at the top of your web browser and indicates what that page is about. If the meta tag is the same on every page that is typically the first indicator that optimization has not been properly conducted yet. They should be unique on every single page depending on the content and material being discussed.

Existing Content
Look at any paragraph headers or content and take a glance to see how powerful or keyword rich the content might be. If it looks very weak then chances are the site has not been optimized or has been optimized poorly. The content should have some keywords naturally embedded in the reading. Remember, always maintain an excellent user experience for your website and NEVER write content just to rank well in the search engines.

URL Structures
Take a look at the URL structures of the website. Are they sloppy? Do they have strings of characters running down the URL bar for the browser? Sometimes depending on how a site is developed it makes it difficult to clean up the URL structures, but most sites have the ability to have nice, well written URL structures. A URL structure should always be optimized with some use of keywords in order to keep it clean and fully readable.

Analytic and Webmaster Information
The best way to tell how well your SEO program is operating is based on the volume of visitors generated from the search engines and also data provided from Google and Bing Webmaster tools. There are a ton of paid tools out there that provide SEO related information for your website, but I always recommend using the free resources and tools that the search engines provide first, and then if you still need additional information, either hire an SEO consultant or purchase one of the many SEO tools out there.

These are probably the four main areas to do a quick visual check in order to see how the search engine optimization quality of your site, or any site, really is. These are areas that should always have some sort of search engine optimization efforts applied in order to be crawlable for the search engines to be able to read and index a site properly. This is a good starting point to help build a long term SEO strategy.

14 Responses to “Quick Website SEO Audit Recommendations”

  • Vic says:
    February 17, 2011 at 11:42 am

    Hi Nick,

    Got here via HN. Nice post, thanks for sharing.

  • Andy @ FirstFound says:
    February 17, 2011 at 3:19 pm

    Psst, Nick. You’ve given us four areas to check and then say there are “three main areas” – just a heads up.

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    February 17, 2011 at 4:04 pm

    Thanks Andy for reading and for picking up on that typo! :)

    Take Care!
    Nick

  • laura@ Niche Marketing says:
    April 7, 2011 at 1:49 pm

    Hey Nick, Just found this blog post from an email sent out this morning:-) I do have a question…without permission to see the Google and Bing webmaster tools- how can I see how if a company may or may not be operating as planned via glancing at the site?

  • Steve Simpson says:
    April 7, 2011 at 1:52 pm

    These are the best principles behind good SEO.

    Thanks,
    Steve

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    April 7, 2011 at 1:59 pm

    Thanks Laura for your question…

    Other than using Google and Bing webmaster tools (which I think by far is the best way) there are several great 3rd party tools out there such as Hubspot (paid) and SEOMoz (paid).

    Hope this helps.
    Nick

  • Benoit Gaillard says:
    April 7, 2011 at 2:13 pm

    Hi Nick,

    What is your perspective on the relevance of backlinks to analyze website SEO?

    Cheers,
    Benoît

  • Minda says:
    April 7, 2011 at 3:25 pm

    I recently looked at Google Webmaster tools and was surprised at how many inbound links we have from spammy sites (some with adult content). Yikes. I want to get them removed so I’ll attempt to contact them – but many don’t post any email contact info and others will just ignore my delinking request. Any other ideas?

  • SEO Expert SF Bay Area says:
    April 7, 2011 at 5:40 pm

    Very quick and to-the-point tips on web site SEO tips.

  • Stephen Berry says:
    April 7, 2011 at 8:14 pm

    Hi Nick,

    Thanks for that article. I am still new at this. What is the best way to select and place keywords in your website.

    Thanks

    Stephen

  • Watch Winders says:
    April 7, 2011 at 8:25 pm

    When you said every page has to be unique for Title. So if my homepage title is “Women Wooden Jewelry Boxes-Jewelry Armoires & Watch Winders” then my Other pages cannot contains these keywords, such as automatic watch winder for main keyword?

    Using google analytical tool free

  • Integraphix SEO Chicago says:
    April 7, 2011 at 10:25 pm

    You’d be surprised how many people forget about URL structure – I’ve seen many a good optimization effort that is ruined by url structure messes. Thanks for sharing.

  • Soni Peterson says:
    April 9, 2011 at 11:36 am

    Really amazing facts are discussed in this valuable article about SEO, I was not taking care of Meta tags, headings and URL’s as well.
    This one is quite helpful for me.

  • Catia Dias says:
    April 10, 2011 at 3:35 am

    Hi Nick, thanks for a great post, I’ve found very helpfull.

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