1.
Accessibility- It is important because if your website is not accessed by the
crawlers, it implies that it does not exist, no matter how beautiful your
website is. So below are the factors you should keep in mind while doing an
audit
·
Robots.txt file- It is used to block certain pages from getting
indexed into search engine. You should be careful on which pages you want to
hide and manually check the robots.txt file, and make sure it's not restricting
access to important sections of your site.
·
HTTP status codes- check all the 301,302, 404 and 501,502 errors
and pages
·
XML sitemap- It should be well documented and should follow the
sitemap protocol. Make sure it is
submitted to the webmaster tools/search engine console. All the pages on the website should be
included in this
·
Site architecture- Overall navigation should be easy and visible
to the users strategically. Sit should follow 3 click rule. Focus on both the
vertical and horizontal linking opportunities
·
Navigation- Avoid flash and javascript navigation
·
Site performance- Use tools like Google page speed, YSlow, Pingdom
full page test
2. Indexability- It is important
because now we want to see how many pages of our website are actually indexed.
·
How many pages are indexed- use site.website.com and see the
results
·
Page searches: Use http://www.example.com
·
Brand searches- Just type your company name, if you are visible
its good. If not, your site has been penalized and its time to dig deep and
sort this issue.
3. On page ranking factors-This is
very important as the changes you make to your website pages will help you
getting indexed on SERP
·
URL- should be short and user friendly (less than 115 characters),
include relevant keywords, should use subfolders and not subdomain, try using
static URLs, make sure you are using hyphens and not underscores
·
Content- each page should ideally contain minimum 300 words and
should create value for the audience who consumes that content. It should
contain the keywords and ideally it should be front loaded. Make sure it is not
spammy, keyword loaded etc. Max keywords in 500 words content should not exceed
5 keywords. No grammatical errors or spelling mistakes and should be easily
readable and also search engines should be easily able to find it and read it.
Focus on how your information architecture is, make sure there is no keyword
cannibalism i.e. multiple pages are targeted for the same keywords (in this
case merge the pages if possible). Avoid duplicate content
·
HTML markup- Use W3C validator to check your site’s HTML code
·
Page titles- 70 characters title, should describe what the page is
all about, should contain a keyword which should be front loaded, should not be
over optimized
·
Meta Descriptions-No more than 155 characters, every page should
have a unique meta description
·
Head tags- Avoid meta keywords in all the pages, use
rel=”canonical” for duplicate content, use ‘rel’ syntax if pagination is used
·
Images- should contain Alt texts and Image file name
·
Outlinks- should be directed to trustworthy sites, relevant to
page’s content, should make use of anchor texts, should not be broken, avoid
unnecessary redirection, make sure if you are outlinking it should not be
‘nofollow’
·
Other <body> tags- Use H1, H2 and H3 tags if applicable to
structure your content. Avoid iframes, appropriate content to ads ratio on the
page should be there.
4. Off Page ranking factors- This
is another part which is very important as this focuses on external factors
which helps your website to get ranked
·
Popularity- how popular is your website (check Alexa), check site
traffic through analytics, use compete and comscore how you perform against
your competitors, check for the total backlinks you are receiving at the moment
·
Trust- To check your
site for malware, you can rely on blacklists such as DNS-BH or Google's Safe
Browsing API. Avoid keyword stuffing, hidden texts, cloaking (i.e., showing the
search engines one thing while showing users something else).
·
Backlinks- number of unique root domains linking to the website,
number of nofollows backlinks (should be very less), anchor text distribution
should seem natural, topically relevant backlinks, the backlinks from the
domain should be from a site which is popular, trustworthy and authoritative
·
Authority- Check for Domain authority and Page authority
·
Social engagement- how
many likes/retweets/+1s/etc. are each of your site's pages receiving; you want
mentions from reputable and highly influential people.
5. Competitive Analysis: It is
important because you want to see how well(or poor) you are performing with
respect to your competitors
6. Strategies- Content strategy,
Keyword strategy, link-building strategy, Blogging strategy, KPIs setting,
Analytics strategy and resources allocation. These are very critical and should
be documented in a separate document.
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