According to Reliablesoft, an SEO audit is a process of evaluating the search engine friendliness of a website in a number of areas. It not only clean up your website, but also makes it stronger and much more competitive.
So perform an SEO audit to compete and gain success.
Study crawl stats of your website
Analyse webmaster tool to see the crawling status of your website, webmaster tool offers accurate data which will help you to perform an
SEO audit.
Analyse Robots.txt
To check the accessibility of a website, you need to analyse Robots.txt.
You must check this in the file itself or use Google Webmaster Tools to see which URLs are not allowed to index.
Check 404 Errors and Redirects
Other common problematic areas are 404 errors as well as redirects.
As far as redirects are concerned, use only 301 redirects, and avoid 302, meta refresh redirects, JavaScript-based redirects because they are not search engine friendly and may confuse search engine bots.
Check XML Sitemap
No SEO audit is complete without a proper examination of an XML sitemap.
XML sitemap must have all the pages of your website. Any sort of sitemap error/warning should be corrected immediately and updated in the Google Webmaster Tools.
Check URLs
According to techwyse, URLs are classified into 2 types:
Static and Dynamic -
- A static URL is one in which the content of the web page remains the same as long as the changes are not hard coded within the HTML.
- A dynamic URL is one which is a result of a search within a website driven by a database running on some script.
Check whether they (urls) are SEO friendly or dynamic.
You should pay attention to:
- Total number of static urls
- Total number of dynamic URLs
- Redirection on the URLs. (301 or 302)
- Duplicate URLs
Outbound Links
You must pay special attention to total number of outbound links and also limit them in order to gain advantage. Use nofollow for outbound links or remove them from the content.
Backlinks
The number and quality of backlinks are very essential. So, when you are performing an SEO audit, you should check:
- Domains that are giving backlinks.
- Total number of backlinks from reputable sites.
- Total number of Dofollow and Nofollow backlinks.
- Bad backlinks
Presence on Social Media
Today, it is important than ever to check social media presence of your website because it is an indicator of a website's overall popularity.
Bonus tips:
- Check spammy and low quality links.
- Remove problematic links.
- Disavow links.
- Revise website structure if it is cluttered.
- Set preferred domain.
- Submit sitemap to webmaster tools.
- Try to use HTTPS because HTTPS protects the integrity of your website (https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/encrypt-in-transit/why-https).
So, focus on these essential audit elements to make your website competitive.
