What is the first task an SEO person does when he starts working on online promotion of any website? Yes, it is to check the strength and overall health of a website that includes the design, quality of images, quality of content and various other factors. In technical terms, this is called SEO audit. The audit helps in finding out the strong and weak points of the website and accordingly make an action plan to work on the weak areas and make it search engine friendly. An SEO friendly website is essential for the success of the search engine optimization activities and high rankings.
As SEO audit is a lengthy process and includes different steps for better results, you should have proper knowledge of different elements. Here are top 6 elements for effective audit.
Overall Summary
As the name suggests it includes an overall audit of the complete website that includes:
Page indexed to find out the number of pages Google has crawled. Just type the syntax site:domain.com in the search bar and see the list of the page the search engine has indexed. If you find some of the pages not indexed, the next step is to find out the reason behind the same.
Backlinks to find out the total number of backlinks your website has. You can check this with your Google webmaster console.
A cache of the site to check which version of your website the search engine has saved. You will get it by typing the syntax cache:domain.com.
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Domain Review
The next step after checking the overall summary is to review the domain. It includes the domain name, age, and expiry date. There are different tools that help you get all the required details about any particular domain. You can review your own domain as well as competitors domain to understand the competition area.
Server Review
It includes the registrar, address and server location review of the website to check the safety of the website. For instance, you have Indian audience, but your domain name has the US in it, the server will get confused. You can gain the benefits by making everything clear like using .in in the domain name as per your target audience and hosting the website on an Indian server. It will help you get better rankings with more traffic. You can easily find different IP checkers to review the server.
URLs
The easiest way to locate a specific web page uniquely in the search engine is to use URL. This is the reason you need to follow different guidelines while creating the page on any website. The best idea is to have more targeted keywords in the URL than the special characters. The keyword speaks about the page and makes it easier for the user to understand what the page offers.
Robots and Sitemaps
These are two important parts of effective SEO Audit. Robot files are the text files designers create on a notepad with .txt extension to handle the crawlers. These work as the guidelines or messengers for the search engine crawlers and prevent them from crawling specific pages you don’t want them to.
Sitemaps are like a book’s index that tells about the pages and other details. This is an XML file with a list of all the pages in a website.
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One Page Elements
The last step in the SEO Audit is to check optimization of the website. This is a deep evaluation of the website to review it completely while covering everything done in the other step of the audit process. It also includes a review of the website for the title tags, meta descriptions, loading time and usage of the keywords. In short, it is the analysis of the overall performance of the website.
Just follow this SEO Audit process and you are closer to the achievement of your goal of ranking higher in the search results.
