10 basic steps for a quick SEO Audit

Search engine optimization is nowadays fundamental. It is also of major importance if you want your site to be at the most critical points in the buying process. And not just that. SEO is essential if you wish to be found when needed. After all, isn’t that the primary reason for creating your website on the first place?

Most websites are not optimized properly for search engines, even though SEO process should be an ongoing effort right from the early stages of site design. Many people realize the need for SEO months or years after their website has been online. And that’s when they will probably need an SEO Audit. An SEO Audit will analyze, measure, and report on major factors influencing organic search engine rankings. Part of an SEO Audit is an SEO expert, putting your site and SEO efforts through a rigorous evaluation. The expert, will focus on primary issues and challenges that need improvement (prioritized for importance), but he will also provide custom recommendations for client-side execution in the form of an SEO roadmap to fix your site.

When you don’t have too much time for an extensive SEO Audit analysis, then you should at least perform a basic audit, which can lead you to interesting conclusions about your website’s performance. Here are ten basic steps that every SEO expert (or even just a website owner/designer) should follow:

Meta-titles

The page title is a very important part of SEO. It should include the proper keywords for every page that you would like to optimize. You should also ensure that the meta-title limit, which is the maximum length search engines will show, is under 55 characters.

Meta-descriptions

A meta-description should be defined in every page of your website. Many pages have no meta-description at all. The optimal meta-description length is 150-160 characters. When you have fewer characters than the optimal in your meta-description, then you cannot provide useful information in search engine results to the user, along with targeted keywords for SEO. When you have more characters than the optimal range, then information is truncated and not shown properly.

Redirects 301 and Canonical URLs

Does the world wide web (www) version of a website redirect to the non-www duplicate content (and the other way round)? You should define in every page which is the primary content page. You can use 301 redirects and the rel=”canonical” link element to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL. A server-side 301 redirect is the best way to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page.

Clean URLs

You should ensure that you use well-structured URLs with important keywords in them, as this is very helpful for SEO.

Meta-keywords

You should ensure that meta-keywords are removed from every page as they don’t offer any SEO related boost. Moreover, meta-keywords are treated sometimes as spam, since there are many low quality websites that give keyword based links.

Google Author

After recent updates from Google, Google Authorship is gaining more and more importance for SEO. For higher rankings in search engines results, you should connect your articles with the author’s Google+ profile by using the authorship markup and the tag rel=author.

Sitemap xml and html

An HTML sitemap allows site visitors to easily navigate a website. It is a bulleted outline text version of site navigation. The anchor text in the outline is linked to the page it refers to. Your website should always have an HTML or an XML sitemap, and this should be registered in Google Webmaster Tools.

Temporary redirects

You should not allow 302 redirects in your website. Make sure that they don’t appear anywhere in your site and use instead 301 redirects.

Noindex option

If you use articles that you have borrowed/copied thoroughly from another website, then you should ensure that you have the “noindex” option in your page source code, so that Google does not index those pages, and subsequently they are not ranked.

404 error pages

You should create a customized 404 error page. The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested. The website hosting server will typically generate a “404 Not Found” web page when a user attempts to follow a broken or dead link; hence the 404 error is one of the most recognizable errors users can find on the web. It is a good practice to customize the 404 error page so that it includes a brief sitemap or/and a search feature for your website. This helps the user to find the information he is looking for and prevents him from leaving our website.

SEO Audit is the first fundamental step to the whole chain of SEO procedure, and if it not performed correctly, then the whole procedure will be based on false estimates. It is also a necessity when you want to know where your SEO efforts have got you to, so far. Without this knowledge it makes no sense to perform any SEO activities, since you don’t know what the return from them is.

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