Website Audit for SEO

What is SEO Audit?

SEO audit simply means find out what’s the current condition & overview of a website.

The auditor will check the web site against a checklist and come up with recommendations of what needs to be fixed (because it is wrong) and what needs to change so that the performance of the web site in search engines is improved.

Website Audit Elements

• On-Page Analysis• Off-Page Analysis• Technical Analysis• Site Structure Analysis

On-Page Analysis

Domain Age Domain age refers to the length of time that a website has

been registered and active.

Domain age conveys trust to website visitors and to the search engines.

Domain age tool gives information that how old the site is.

Note: The older domain (2-3 years old), the better for SEO. Older domains are better for reaching high rankings in search engines.

Tool:(https://www.whois.net/)

Meta , Header and Alt TagsMeta Tags: Test to check the meta title and description These parts are indicated in the SERPs (search engine

resulted pages) as snippets (see screenshot below), have strong impact on SE robots, and influence the users’ decision-making to click on the site’s link among SE results

It is strongly recommended to include the main keywords for a webpage in its’ title and description

Length of meta title should be less than 70 characters Length of meta description should be less than 150

characters

Header Tag & Alt Tags: Test to check if H1 & H2, H3 and H4 tags are

appropriately used in the web pages. H1 tag is used to donate the primary topic and rest are used to donate the sub topics to search engines and users.

Test to check the images in the website for alt tags.

URL Structure

Are the URLs static or dynamic? Are the URLs short or long? Do the URLs contain its relevant keywords? Do the URLs include hyphens or underscores?

Source:(http://www.mypartyshoponline.com/ , http://www.dignitasdigital.com/)

Off - Page Analysis

BacklinksBacklinks are the links that are directed towards the website. Also known as inbound links. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Evaluation of the backlinks Finding whether the backlinks are coming from a quality sites Judging whether the links are coming from a relevant website

Page Rank

• PageRank (PR) is a quality metric invented by Google's owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin

• Google algorithm count website page rank count out of 10

• New website has 0 PR

Source:(http://redfusionmedia.com/what-does-your-google-pagerank-mean/)Tool:(http://www.prchecker.info/

check_page_rank.php)

Page Authority(PA) & Domain Authority(DA)

Domain authority is a metric to predict the ability of a website / domain to rank in search engines. Domain authority uses a 0 to 100 logarithmic scale.

Page authority is a metric to predict the ability for a specific page to rank in search engines. Page authority uses a 0 to 100 logarithmic scale.

Source:(Moz.com) Tool:(https://moz.com/researchtools/ose)

Technical Analysis

Robots.txt

Check Robots.txt file is available or not? Robots.txt file is required to instruct the web robots about the crawlable and non-crawlable pages on site

Below Image shows that manually checking Robots.txt

Sitemap.xml Whether the sitemap is available or not? If it is available then it is formatted correctly A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently

Below Image shows that manually checking sitemap.xml

Site Speed The site speed at which the website loads and can be used by its visitors is

Important from a user perspective.

Web site should load fast and preferably faster than their competitors. There

are tool by Google (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

that give the recommendations about page speed.

Standard loading time is around 2.5 – 3 seconds

Tool:(https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

Site Structure Analysis

Website Flow• A website flow in a properly planed hierarchy

Example:

Source:(mypartyshoponline.com)

Benefits of a Good Site Structure• A good structure means better crawling: The better your site structure, the easier the crawlers can access

and index the content

• A good site structure provides your site with sitelinks: Sitelinks are a listing format in the SERPs that show your site’s main page along with several internal links indented below.

• A good site structure means a great user experienceSource:(https://blog.kissmetrics.com/site-structure-enhance-seo/)