Before you start your SEO strategy, make sure your website is free of glitches and optimized for search engines! Your on-site optimization helps search engines determine your authority and relevance to search terms and your ranking.
The Technical Audit examines your site for technical issues that may affect your user experience and search engine rankings! Internal link optimization helps examine your site’s link structure, anchor text, and image links for errors and opportunities to optimize.
#1 – Technical Audit
Start with a technical audit of your site to identify any technical issues that may affect website performance and ranking. The technical audit looks at the aspects of your site that are important and identifies where errors are occurring, including:
- Your site visitors and crawlers have no patience for slow site speed. The faster the better!
- Search engines see links, anchors, and images as quality factors of the website.
- Mistakes in encoding can cause slow response time and server issues that affect overall quality.
#2 – SEO analysis of the website
Once all the technical issues are addressed, proceed to perform an SEO audit of your website:
- Examine issues on the site that are relevant to search engine bots, website quality, and rankings.
- Create a Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt file for your site and tell search engines how to navigate and index your content.
- A temporary redirect, where an old URL is redirected to a new one, is confusing to search engines as to whether to redirect traffic to a new site with a permanent 301 redirect.
- If you use dynamic URLs, make sure they are search engine friendly and as simple as possible, and have an organized structure, such as http://www.example.com/category/subcategory/service-specific.com
- It is important to have a unique title tag (70 characters) for each page of your website. Engines display the Title Tag in search results, it’s what users will click on to get to your site, so make it count!
- Search engines display the description tag (320 characters) below the title tag in search results, it’s also the snippet of text that automatically appears when the URL is shared on social media! Just like with title tags, your description tags must be unique for each page.
- The H1 heading is the most important heading on your page and is used by search engines to determine the relevance of your page to search terms. Make sure you only have one H1 on each of your web pages, any subsequent headings should be H2-H4.
- Every web page should have some outgoing links to other high ranking pages, depending on the amount of content on a page, keep the amount of links below 100.
- Image ALT attributes enrich the usability of the website and allow images to be ranked in the results!
- Check the page speed and loading time of your site! Sites with low page speed are not user friendly and may be ignored by search engines.
- Use a mobile-friendly or responsive web design to ensure your site looks and works great on all kinds of devices! Search engines will also identify your site as mobile friendly when it ranks in mobile search results. Identify specific aspects of your site that could affect performance on mobile devices.
#3 – Internal link optimization
Carefully optimize your anchor text for specific keywords! Search engines look for keywords within the anchor text to understand what a web page is about and how it should be indexed.
- The texts of the links found on your website, and the pages where they are found.
- The total number of pages that have the link text.
- The authority of the link text when used as anchor text
- A series of links to pages that are blocked from crawling (via Robots.txt or the noindex tag).
- Links to pages that are listed as nofollow and will not pass on ‘link juice’.
- Sitewide links are less valuable than links placed in text and surrounded by thematically relevant words!
Hiring SEO professionals to perform a full SEO audit of your site will identify specific areas to improve your website’s performance and ranking.
