As with most things the key to SEO (search engine optimisation) success is in the planning. In order to coax the best results from your SEO efforts you will need to know your website inside out, you will need to know the tricks of the trade and you will need to have a firm grasp of what it is you actually want to achieve.
The easiest way to determine where to begin is with a thorough review of your website and your current marketing strategy (or lack of the case may be). The art of a website review is often called a website audit and should form the basis of every decision you make when marketing online from there on. Indulge Media offer expert advise and services on search engine optimisation in Guernsey and we will talk you through what a website audit involves and why each stage is important to determine how to improve your website.
Website Audit
Usability
A great place to start and a part of the online process which is often missed when reviewing a website in terms of SEO is website usability. Many believe (wrongly) that usability and success in the search engine rankings do not correlate however usability is considered one of the most important factors on a website and as such search engines make every effort to review a site with regards to usability.
Making sure the layout and structure of your site is both logical and intuitive is a great place to start, as well as this enhancing the experience of using your website can help to improve conversion rates and return visits and these certainly impact on SEO.
Crawlability
What use is a website that the search engines cannot find? 'No use' is the simple answer. Any website audit should set one of its key check to be that of reviewing whether the website can actually be crawled. You would be amazed at how many website owners don't realise that certain bits of their site are hindering the search engine spiders. A decent website audit will pick through the deep code of your site to ensure that search engines can move easily through it all without any trouble.
Search Engine Status
Now the website audit moves into the nuts-and-bolts area of SEO; where your website stands on the search engines. The search engine check should be one of the most thorough within the website audit as it not only determines what needs to be done to your website but it also creates a solid grounding for the keyword research stage of SEO.
There are numerous tricks we can use on the search engines to see where your website sits, what keywords people are using to find you and which keywords you should be ranking for but are not. This can be one of the most revealing processes to go through and can reveal some glaring problems with a website. It is also worth checking what Google have got stored for your website, making sure that the latest version of your site is on thier index.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a common problem and it can be a big problem. If you own a website and you own the domain names for yourwebsite.com and yourwebsite.co.uk then chances are both addresses lead to the same page...or do they?
Many people fail to notice that Google sees two different domain names as two different sites and unless you take measures to ensure that one domain has a 301 re-direct in place to the other then chances are you are running two websites that are exactly the same and this can be very costly in terms of SEO. A thorough website audit will determine if the correct 301 re-directs are in places and where extra work is needed.
URL
One of the most important aspects of a website in terms of standard ‘on-page’ SEO is the page URL. This is the location at which the page is held. Having a URL made up of descriptive words as opposed to a line of code is much more acceptable and the search engines will love you for it. A full website audit should ensure it looks at the structure of the URL of each and every page to make sure that is working correctly for the website.
Title Tag Review
Title tags are one of my favourite elements of a website audit in terms of SEO. Writing an SEO friendly page title is surprisingly easy yet so many website owners miss this glaring opportunity. Website title tags are used by the search engines as one of the primary places to pick up what the specific page is all about.
A decent website audit should ensure that each and every page title is unique and descriptive. If the page in question sells flowers in Guernsey, then the page title tag should say exactly that (taking into consideration the necessary keywords of course).
META Tag Review
META tags, although not the most important for SEO on your website as other elements are still quite key to the success of your rankings. Good META tags should give your site focus and context. The description tag in particular should be taken care of as this is quite often where Google gets your site description from in the search engine rankings.
Content Review
A website without content is like a car without tyres. Content is king; yes I know it is a cliché but it really is true. When you began making your website the first thing you should have done is specified what the point of it is and that in turn should help determine what the content is. A website audit will make sure that your website is full of useful content; content that your target market will find useful and content which backs up your target keyword choices.
Sitemap/Robots.txt
The sitemap and robots.txt are two files that every website should have. They both act as a guide for the search engine website crawlers, one lays out where the spider should go (sitemap), the other keeps the spider away from content that does not need to be crawled (robots.txt). In a website audit one should use an admin tool like Google Webmaster Tools to run checks that both of these files exist and are working correctly.
Internal Links
The power of internal links is sometimes overlooked but consider this: One of the grounding rules of good SEO management is that each page on your website should be targeted towards one single idea, or keyword. With this in mind consider the power of every time you link to a certain page from another page of your website you use the anchor text that is the keyword of the page you are linking to. That way, every time Google follows a link within your site that is the keyword and ends up at the same page they will be in no doubt which page on your site is dedicated to that topic. A website audit will highlight where links can be changed to increase the power of internal linking structures on your website.
Page Load Times
The internet is all about fast and with the recent launch of Google Instant the word ‘fast’ became even more prominent. It is no secret that Google are constantly in search of faster results and so it is no surprise that the faster your website loads the better. Within a website audit checks should be carried out to ensure that your page loads at an acceptable speed and if not, will identify places where the problem lies. This can include images which haven’t been optimized for the web or large videos on the site.
External Links
When it comes to external links there are two ways to look. One is the amount of links coming into your website (backlinks). Many would say that the amount and quality of links pointing to your site is the most important aspect of SEO, and they could be right. Within a website audit there should be a full list of links coming to the site found and the quality of them assessed. There are numerous tools to find backlinks including using the ‘link:’ search option in Google. To asses the quality of a link you need to look at the site topic that links to you, where on the site the link is (within a block of text is best) and what anchor text is used (keyword text is best).
As well as looking at links which are coming into your website, a good website audit should take a look at the links which are pointing out of your website. The search engines will be interested to see what sites you consider to be useful to your visitors and they can glean a lot from this information. Make sure that your website links out to other websites.
Code Quality
A more technical aspect of a website audit comes with checking the quality of the code that site is written in. Although it is not commonly believed that code quality affect SEO, it is certainly true that poor code can affect the way a search engine crawls your site and it can also have harmful effects on how people see your site through different web browsers and devices.
Image ALT Tags
We cannot forget about images. Images are tricky for search engines because their spiders cannot actually see the images so are forced to rely on the ALT tags and filename of the image. A website audit should ensure that ALT tags are relevant and describe the image so that the search engine crawler can gain an idea of what the image is.
This covers the very basics of a website audit and what sort of things a website auditor should be looking for. There are many elements to a successful website and it is rare to find a website that ticks all of the boxes first time round. The ability to run a website audit and find actionable insights takes a team of people with a range of skills; from marketing staff to technical experts. A good website audit will leave you with a guide on how your website can perform much better. Think of it as an MOT for your website!
Image kindly supplied by indi.ca on Flickr under a Creative Commons licence!
