✅ Focus on improving Website SEO
Ranking in Google only becomes more competitive as every day goes on. There are many thousands of websites fighting for those few spots on the primary page of results.
In order to rank, you would like to be focused on building the simplest content online that helps to focus on the user’s specific queries. To this implementation, an SEO audit can be one of the best tactics to grow your website.
SEO is a crucial element in increasing your business’ ROI online. Search is not any longer a mere Q&A platform, it now features a crucial and significant impact on your customer targeting that each one marketer and business owner should worry about nowadays.
AN on-page SEO audit is an important implementation part of your blog or website.
Several marketing statistics compiled by Hubspot shows that 70 to 80% of program users specialize in organic results, and organic SEO is deemed 5.66 times better compared to paid search ads. seems like it’s all about organic lately, huh?
Auditing your website will be a more valuable part to increase your visitor. These are key elements that we’ve covered in this article.
- On-page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Offpage SEO
1. On page SEO
On-page SEO is the most important part. Here are the important optimization elements that you should follow at the first step of the audit.
Title Optimization
The SEO title is a crucial part to boost your ranking well on the SERPs page. A well-optimized title will surely increase your traffic conversion rate (CR).
The descriptive title tag catches the potential visitors’ attention and forces them to click on the link. It directly impacts the user experience (UX).
What is SEO Title Tag?
When we search any specific query in Google or other search engines, SERP pages show results with headlines. These clickable headlines are called title tags.
It’s so important to write an outstanding page title for bloggers doing SEO. Because the heading is the main thing a user sees and determines the topic to check the document on the search engine result page.
How to create a search engine friendly title tag?
At this time, the search engine bot is smarter to identify the game. But only an SEO friendly title can be the only game for it.
Here are few step that you can apply when create a title tag:
- Write the title for humans first
- Keep your titles short and to the point
- Try adding the main keyword closer to the beginning
- If possible, try optimizing the title for multiple keywords
- Try to avoid keyword cannibalization with other articles
- Make your title catchy to improve CTR
- Fill short titles with calls to action
- Make your article & title look fresh
- Back up your title tag with relevant content
- Use different titles for SEO & Social Media
Meta Description
The meta description is another important part of on-page SEO. Meta tag provides a short description of an individual page or post. Though it’s not a direct ranking factor metadata increases the website page click.
What is an SEO meta description?
The meta description is an HTML code for each page or post. Search engines recommend putting brief details of the page for visitors.
In other words, the meta description is a sales text to generate more leads.
Best practice to create a outstanding meta description
Here are a few steps that can make a description more search engine friendly and also for visitors.
- Keep it up to 155 characters
- Use active voice and make it actionable
- Include a call-to-action
- Use your focus keyword
- Show specifications, where possible
- Make sure it matches the content of the page
- Make it unique
Focus Keywords in keyword meta
Focus keyword in meta title and description is one of the best tricky methods in SEO. It’s a great process to introduce to search engines about the post.
What is the focus keyword?
If you want to rank for the specific search query that is called the focus keyphrase. Search crawlers can easily find the topic of the post for optimizing keywords.
Best practice to input focus keyword in title and description
- In the title using one main keyword
- In meta description use synonym of focus keyword. Don’t over-optimize the keyword.
- In your description, use the LSI pattern for the keyword phrases.
HTML Headings
HTML Headings provide valuable information by highlighting important content. It helps the article to be more structured as also readable for search engine bots.
“There are six levels of headings in HTML with H1 as the most important and H6 as the least.”
W3C
H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 & H6 are called HTML headings. It can convey the structure and hierarchy in the entire post content.
These are html coding examples:
<h1>Heading level 1</h1>
<h2>Heading level 2</h2>
<h3>Heading level 3</h3>
<h4>Heading level 4</h4>
<h5>Heading level 5</h5>
<h6>Heading level 6</h6>
The output of HTML headings are something like this:
External Link to relevant Resources
The term external link is also called an outbound link that moves visitors from pages on your website to other sites. Google loves relevant links to other authority pages. To get more natural both for readers and search engines, an external link plays a vital role.
Why external links are so important?
Outbound links are one of the great tactics for the popularity of the page. According to most famous SEO experts suggest to input relevant links to other pages. They think these links can be ranking power.
These are some important reasons to input outbound links:
- More natural to search engine and readers
- Gain authority
- Trust to the visitor
- Balance Anchor text diversity
- Link back possibility from others website
Best Practice to Input Outbound links
Link to other pages means redirect website viewer to others website. Not only that it can pass link juice to their sites. For this, you should more care about linking other pages. Each visitor is most the most important for bloggers. Here are some tricky methods that you can apply:
✅ Link to high authority site than you:
A high authority site is the first priority to input outbound links. If your external resource is too poor link popularity or low traffic volume, it can negatively impact your site.
✅ Anchor a word that they already know what is:
This method will help you to discourage authority link clicks. Setup some anchor text like:
“As you already know….”
“It’s common knowledge…”
✅ Avoid to use Wikipedia link:
Everyone uses Wikipedia as an outbound link. But this method isn’t good enough in recent times. Google can consider spammy or un-natural pages using too much link of Wikipedia.
Focus Keyword in first 100 words
Focus keyword or main keyword is the key phrase you want your post to rank for. Search engine algorithm identifies the focus topic in the introduction part or from the entire content. So it would be better to input a focus keyword in your first intro. Expert suggests within 100 words, you should apply the main keyword.
Image Alt Tags
According to the research by Jumshot and SparkToro, over 22% of internet image searches were done and 3% of Google search clicks. In July 2001, Google introduced image search functionality. So if you properly optimize your images including the right Alt text, it can be featured as a snippet.
What is image Alt tags?
Image Alt tags are alternative attributes of an image tag. An alternative attribute is a modifier. This modifier provides descriptive details info in an individual tag about the image on each page of HTML code. The image info details help to assist visually impaired search engine crawler and website visitor.
For example: This is a product of amazon named “Logitech G502 Hero High Performance Gaming Mouse“.
Alt tag of this image is:
<img alt="Logitech G502 Hero High Performance Gaming Mouse" src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51IOmsWQVAL._AC_SL1050_.jpg" class="fullscreen" style="margin-top: 10px; margin-left: 45.2611px; height: 444px; width: 804.478px;">
Schema Markups
Schema markup is code (semantic vocabulary). This semantic code you put on your website to help the search engines return more detailed structured format results for users. If you’ve ever used rich snippets, you’ll understand exactly what schema markup is all about.
How to Use Schema Markup for SEO
Schema Markup is an advanced on-page procedure that can be harder to understand for beginners.
You only need to consider schema if one or both of these things are true:
- Your pages already rank well in SERP pages, and the content is enough eligible for rich results.
- You already have a strong brand presence
For example, here’s some very simple markup about myself that would fit on my author page:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Aladin",
"url": "https://tecxoo.com/author/aladin/",
"image": "https://tecxoo.com/wp-content/themes/images/authors/aladin.jpg",
"sameAs": [
"https://twitter.com/aladin",
"https://www.linkedin.com/in/aladin/",
],
"jobTitle": "SEO Specialist",
"worksFor": {
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Tecxoo"
}
}
</script>
Check Duplicate Thin Content
“Thin” content is one of the most misused formulas in the SEO industry. Whenever there’s an inexplicable drop in rankings, a lot of specialists are ready to jump in and blame an alleged “thin” or “duplicate” content penalty.
On the other hand, whenever Google is willing to confirm an update, they would include “thin content” as a negative impact and make a manual penalty claim.
How to Identify Thin Content on Your Site
These are process to identify thin content:
- Use a SEO crawler to find pages with the least word count
- Use a SEO crawler to find content
- Look at those backlinks
- Check if your content is being stolen
Internal Linking
An internal link is any link from one page on your website that can connect to another page on your website. Google loves good internal links and it’s crucial to your SEO.
Internal links connect posts with your own website. This process also helps to pass the link juice to balance.
Why internal links are important?
Internal linking is so much important for SEO. It helps website to stay more time to visit. More staying time of visitor means more revenue.
On the other hand Google openly declared that internal links is the ranking signal.
An Actionable Guide for Internal Link Audit
These are the actionable process for internal link audit:
- Identify broken internal links
- Identify Internal links to redirected pages
- Identify Lots of internal links to unimportant pages
Check Mobile Friendlyness
Mobile responsive web pages grow so rapidly than other small device broken view website. All of search engine algorithm care about mobile responsive functionality.
How to check mobile Friendlyness?
Google has a aweosme tool to check the whole website or individual page mobile responsiveness.
Go to https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly link and check your website.
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the starting point to be succeeded in ranking game. Technical optimized website can be helpful to rank fast. Here are some technical seo checklist:
Check Only One Version of the Site
Did you check your website in a different version? Any website has at least two separate versions in the eyes of the search engines. If you fail to use the right one can lead to significantly lower results in terms of SEO and visibility.
Google identifies the www. and non-www. versions of your website as an individual web asset. It’s important to add and verify every one of your website’s URLs. It will be a clear picture of what’s going on with the search engines.
Should I Use the Www. or Non-www. Site Version?
The www. or non-www. version are both as the preferred site that you can use. It’s totally up to you. Just remember that how Google is currently indexing your site, and what the database resources utilize.
Check Canonical Version
Since 2009, Canonical tags are playing a vital role in the SEO industry —the best part of a decade.
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo united to create them to identify and solve the duplicate content issues on their website.
What is a canonical tag?
A canonical tag (rel=“canonical”) is something like a snippet of HTML code that provides only one version for duplicate pages, or near-duplicate similar pages.
In other words, the same or similar content available under another duplicate URL, you can use canonical tags to find which version is the main one and thus, should be indexed.
XML Sitemap File Error
Google always suggests: “keep your sitemaps validated and as error-free, as you can.” The sitemap file is used to declare the preferred canonical URL.
As a signal, an error in a sitemap file is a pretty big deal and best to be avoided.
How to find xml sitemap error?
You can get error data from your google webmaster tools. Or if you want to check it manually, screamingfrog tool is the best option.
How to check your XML Sitemap for errors with Screaming Frog
Following these steps you can easily find the XML sitemap errors:
- Open Screamingfrog and select “List Mode”
- Grab the URL of your sitemap.xml file
- Head to Upload > Download Sitemap
- Frog will confirm the URLs found in the sitemap file
- Click Start to start crawling
- Export the data to CSV or sort by Status Code to highlight any potential issues
Redirection Chain Issue
A redirect chain creates when there is several post, post or others url redirect between the initial URL and the destination URL. When a URL is redirected, it should have a single 301 redirect in place.
Reason to happen redirect chain
Mainly it has two reasons to happen this chain:
- Reason #1: Redirect chains are built over time. URL A is redirected to URL B, then a year later URL B is redirected to URL C.
- Reason #2: A combination of HTTPS vs. HTTP, www vs. non-www, and trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash redirects results in site-wide redirect issues.
Check Breadcrumbs Issue
Breadcrumbs are an important technical SEO part of almost every good website. These little navigational aids provide to the visitor where they are on your site. It also helps Google work out how your site is structured. For this reason, breadcrumbs make a lot of sense to add these helpful little pointers.
How to add breadcrumbs?
There are several steps to creating breadcrumbs for your site. Firstly, if you use WordPress, you can add breadcrumbs with the help of several plugins.
Yoast SEO provide an easy way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site. Just add the following piece of code to your theme where you want them to appear:
<?php
if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
yoast_breadcrumb( '</p><p id="breadcrumbs">','</p><p>' );
}
?>
Fix Crawl Errors
The Google Search Console tools have everything you need to check your website.
Google divides errors into two types:
- Site errors: appear if the bot cannot bypass the entire resource;
- URL errors: indicate an issue on separate pages.
The first should be fixed as quickly as possible: they affect the promotion process. If the website is not optimized, fixing these errors will have little effect on the ranking in search results.
Check Client Side Server Errors
When a visitor clicks on a post, it sends a request to the server and the server is unable to understand, it displays a 400 bad request error page. It happens when the input sent by the client, doesn’t honor the rules of the HTTP protocol, so the webserver is doubtful in reverse how to process a request containing an abnormal syntax.
Solution to 404 Error
- Check the requested URL.
- Clear relevant cookies.
- Upload a smaller file.
- Log out and log in.
- Rollback recent upgrades.
- Uninstall new extensions, modules, or plugins.
- Check for unexpected database changes.
Structures Data Markup
SEOs have been talking about structured data for a few years now — ever since Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex got together in 2011
What is structured data?
Structured data, also called schema markup, is a type of code that makes it easier for search engines to crawl, organize, and display your content.
Google has a structured data guidelines that you can follow:
<html>
<head>
<title>Party Coffee Cake</title>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Recipe",
"name": "Party Coffee Cake",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Mary Stone"
},
"datePublished": "2018-03-10",
"description": "This coffee cake is awesome and perfect for parties.",
"prepTime": "PT20M"
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Party coffee cake recipe</h2>
<p>
This coffee cake is awesome and perfect for parties.
</p>
</body>
</html>
Robots.txt file
The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or standard, is a text file that tells web robots. Robot.txt file introduce to crawler which pages on your site is about.
Google has a perfect guideline for crawl limit and other issues about robot.txt file.
Check Webmaster Manual Actions
As a blogger, it can be a common issue getting a message from Google Search Console about a manual action that has been placed on your website. Manual actions are Google’s way of demoting or removing web pages or websites as a whole.
To check manual actions in your website, you can check google manual action tools.
Google says about this action:
If your site is in the very small fraction that do have a manual spam action, chances are we’ve already notified you in Webmaster Tools. We’ll keep sending those notifications, but now you can also do a live check against our internal webspam systems. Here’s what it would look like if Google had taken manual action on a specific section of a site for “User-generated spam
Google Manual action guidelines
Types of Manual Actions
- Unnatural Links to Your Site
- Hacked Site
- Thin Content
- Pure Spam
- User-Generated Spam
- Cloaking and Sneaky Redirects
- Hidden Text and Keyword Stuffing
- Spammy Freehosts
- Spammy Structured Markup
Page Speed
Page Speed is very crucial part for a website. It’s so important that Google has made it an actual ranking factor. Over time, Google even most of the search engines has taken action to improve the loading speed of websites by providing a set of tools for developers and webmasters.
How to check page speed?
There are several online tools to check page speed. Google has also an awesome tool to check page speed. You can access PageSpeed Insights by visiting https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.
Tecxoo page speed checker can the best option for checking the page speed.
3 Offpage SEO
Offpage seo is another game ball for ranking your specific keyword. Google care more reference from others website. Fresh backlink profile will make your site to rank easily.
Here are instruction to do offpage seo audit.
Check Backlink Profile
SEO involves a number of different parameter and moving pieces. Each of elements which are equally important to the health and strength of your website. Backlinks are an essential aspect of SEO because they help to build your website’s domain and page authorities.
What are Backlinks?
A backlink is a link on another website that directs back to your site. In the past of search engines, Google’s ranking algorithm relied almost solely on a website’s backlink portfolio.
How to check backlink profile?
There are several great backlink checker tools to find backlink profile. Here is the list:
- SEMrush
- Tecxoo Backlink checker
- Ahrefs
- Moz Link Explorer
- Buzzsumo
- Google Seach Console
- Majestic
- Ubersuggest
Check Competitors Backlink Profile
To bit your competitors, it’s most important to check their backlink profile deeply. This process is the same as your own website backlink profile checking.
Consider All Types Backlinks:
You can check your competitors backlinks by SEMRush. It has nice option to find breaks down a website’s link profile by type. These include:
- Text links
- Image links
- Frame links
- Form links
✅ What is an SEO audit?
✅ What does our SEO Audit Tool provide?
✅ Why You Need an SEO audit?
✅ Why is website auditing important?
Final Thoughts
A better SEO audit provides the most effective way to correct them. Regular website audits keep the website agile and aligned with Google’s best practices.
Website audits are an essential measure to improve the efficiency and visibility of a website. It improves Google search ranking while increasing site traffic and performance.