Thursday, 11 August 2016

SEO Audit Checklist to Beat the Competition

Without SEO, you would not be able to build up your brand’s visibility, and your potential customers would not be able to find you. However, optimizing your site for a search engine is not as simple as it sounds.


You may think you have done your SEO diligence, but you don’t really know if it is working. You need to assess if your SEO is spot on by completing an SEO audit checklist. This helps you fill in the missing pieces and beat your competitors to the punch. There are several elements that you need to check in order to ensure that your site can easily be crawled by spiders and be indexable by Google; check out some of these below:


Meta Data


Most site owners are concerned about their content, and they should be.


According to Edugeeksclub writer Michael Hutton, “High-quality organic content is a key factor in SEO, which is what we do. Many of our clients come to us regularly to provide them with well-researched articles.”


However, what a reader sees on a page is not what the search engines index. They look at meta data — scraps of text in the page’s code that describes the content on the page. You should, therefore, pay close attention to the tags and attributes of your web page for on-page optimization. You can check these without opening an HTML editor by right-clicking on the page and choosing “View Page Source.”


Title Tag


There is a certain order of certain meta data that can help you with SEO. It should be first, and then , and . There may be other tags in between, but what is important is they are in this overall order.


Character Count


Google, and most search engines for that matter, have a limit to the number of characters they crawl before indexing the page, also known as the search engine results pages (SERP) cut off.


In most cases, the SERP cut off for title tags is between 55 and 65 characters, and the description tags at 156 characters. This means you need to include important keywords before the cutoff for SEO.


Keywords


Ensure that the keyword tags include important keywords for the post. While Google has stopped indexing meta attributes because of keyword stuffing, it can’t hurt to put them in anyway to increase your chances of being indexed in your relevant niche.


Content


Your text content should be at least 700 words, and in many cases, more is better for SEO. Adding images, videos, slides and infographics can also help you rank better. Before uploading images, make sure that you compress and resize it for optimization, and don’t forget about ALT tag. You also have to make sure that you do not post duplicate content and include social media buttons.


Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)


Aside from your main keywords, you should also look for LSI keywords. These are related terms, but not synonymous, to your primary keywords. You can use a tool such as this SEOPressor plugin to identify related keywords for your page.


CSS and HTML Codes


Make sure that different kinds of codes in your web page are kept separate. Keeping JavaScript, CSS, and HTML codes in one file makes it hard for the search engines to read. If you are not sure how to do this, ask your web administrator to check into it.


Site Performance


Aside from stuff you will find in your meta tags, you can audit the way your site performs. Google will rank your pages higher if you make sure it performs at its peak. You can do this simply by going to each page and checking them yourself.


  • 301 redirects, 404 errors, and so on

  • Loading speed and mobile usability

  • Quality and relevance of internal links, outbound links, and backlinks

  • Ease of navigation

  • Social bookmarks

  • Sitemaps

Making sure that your site and pages are optimized for search engines is a top priority for many site owners, and for good reason. SEO is necessary for building brand recognition online. An SEO audit checklist can help ensure you are going about it the right way.



Source: B2C

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