Search Engine Marketing Auditing – We Expose The Key Sections Of A Simple Audit

A professional search engine optimization audit looks at quite a lot of elements as a way to highlight any problem areas that may very well be causing your website to perform poorly in search results. Nonetheless, many smaller websites are quite simple in nature, being constructed soley from HTML and CSS with no content management system in place, this kind of web site is very simple to audit as there is far less to go wrong, and the possibility of canonicalization is very small unless they are brought on by incorrect server configuration. For websites like these, the below information ought to aid you to carry out a reasonably in depth web optimization audit and highlight any really extreme issues. Owners of more complexed websites such as e commerce stores and CMS based web sites should always think about seeking professional search engine optimization Services if the site is not performing as it should in search results and your link building appears to have no effect.

1. Duplicate content detection.

High quality and unique content is of the utmost importance if you wish for your website to have any real chance of ranking nicely. Use copyscape on every page throughout your site to find out which ones if any have content that is used on other websites throughout the internet. Don’t use copy scape’s batch search either, it only checks for duplicate content material against Yahoo’s index, and since there’s only a sixty % overlap between the Yahoo and Google indexes, the chances are you will miss some pretty bad duplicate content matches that ought to really be addressed. Pages like terms and conditions and privacy policy pages are prime candidates here, and any pages like this which are not used as landing pages and have no beneficial purpose from being listed can be blocked through robots.txt and eliminated from google’s index through web master tools. If positive duplicate content results are found. Product pages should not be blocked and removed from google, but rather rewritten to be unique, product pages are valuable landing pages and they therefore should be corrected.

2. Server Configuration.

Server configuration should always only allow every web page to be accessed on either the www. version or the non www version, and never on both. In case your pages can be found on both variations, then it’s essential to add a canonical rewrite rule to your ht access file (apache) or contact your internet hosting provider and get them to edit the server header file (windows servers).

3. Hidden Textual content And Efficient Coding.

View the source code of every web page in your browser, and search for anything untoward such as negative text indents that are then padded back out utilizing no break browser spaces, also search for any textual content in the code which is not displayed on the page as it is normally seen, it isn’t uncommon for web designers to hide textual content by pushing it outside the viewable space using css, this is known as cloaking and is strictly black hat. Cloaking carries severe penalties and if you happen to uncover any instances you must amend them immediately. Also search for code that looks inefficient and amend any instances you discover, this may improve the text/code ratio of the page and load speeds.

4. Navigation Analysis.

Verify that navigation is readable by google, is user friendly, and contains important keywords wherever attainable without any detrimental effect to usability. A great tip is to check the websites source code and search for javascript tags round any navigation, if you happen to locate any then you want to think about altering the sites navigation to a css menu, or at the very least supporting the unreadable navigation with hyperlinks in the footer section of your site.

Nicholas Davison is the Managing Director of High Impact SEO, a Leeds based SEO Company which provides award winning SEO Services to clients across the globe.