Your website is never a finished article, there are always constant tweaks and improvements you can make. Take a look at our article “https://www.voovadigital.com/4-common-seo-mistakes-marketers-make/” for more infomation. And from an SEO point of view there is no stopping constantly split-testing every element.
But in reality, unless a professional digital marketing company is engaged to do this work, only so much time can be devoted to this.
Here is a quick guide how to do auditing on a regular basis.
Start crawling your website by entering its URL into your favourite SEO crawling tool, ensure that the tool that you use can scan every resource on your website: Images, video, flash, JavaScript and CSS. Depending on your website this only takes a few minutes.
- Check your sitemap
Depending if you are using a sitemap tool, you can manage it automatically to create an XML sitemap or you will have to do it manually. Either way make sure your sitemap is current and up-to-date.
- Check your robots.txt
Using your auditing tool, check your robots.txt’s instructions and see if any important pages are being blocked. If they are, you need to add an allow rule to enable indexing.
- Check for errors
You can check your website for crawl errors through your site auditing tool or by going to Crawl>Crawl Errors in your Google Search Control. Ensure your website has a 404 page set up in the first place to link your visitors back to important pages.
- Ask Google to re-crawl your pages
Once you have made your changes, ask Google to re-crawl your pages. To do this go to your Search Console, Crawl> Fetch as Google and enter the URL of your updated page, then click Fetch.
- Fix any errors on your sitemap
- Review your robots.txt file
- Ensure all important pages can be indexed
- Fix HTTP errors
- Ask search engines to re-crawl your site
- Replace 302 redirects with permanent 301 ones
- Remove meta refresh from pages
- Check for rel=”canonical” issues
Look for pages that are too big, pages that use frames and pages that contain W3C errors and warning. Coding errors slow down your website.
- Fix broken links
- Mitigate outgoing links
- Limit redirects
- Fix unreadable URL’s
- Keep URL’s short and accurate
- Optimise titles for SEO
- Optimise meta descriptions for SEO
- Optimise header tags for SEO
High quality content is one of the most important elements of your website. You need to ensure that the content is valuable and easy to find, also that it is original and not just copied.
- Find and add to thin content
- Make content as unique as possible
- Fix broken images and empty alt text tags
If you attend to all of the above suggestions and directions you are well on the way to optimising your site for the best efficiency. This is not the end but it is surely a great start, and if performed on a regular basis will help to complete a full website audit later on.
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