Search Engine Optimization Audit

The first step in making your website search engine friendly is to look at your website more closely with the guidelines on how to create an effective website before a more search engine approach is applied.

Step 1: Know your Objectives

It is important to know the objectives of your website and how does its presentation condone to achieving what is targeted. There are specific questions in mind in which you need to ask yourself in order to know how your website is doing like “Are you trying to sell something?” or “Are you trying to prove a point?”
You should always keep your customers with the notion of “Okay, what’s next?”

Ask yourself this: “Is your website doing what it is supposed to do?”

Assuming that it’s objective is not malicious in nature and if you can answer yes to this then you are ready for step 2.

Step 2: Check for Malfunctions

Any website when built will have a certain process flow to follow. Go through your site as any visitor and act as if you were a customer. If this is your own website, if it best if you can have a friend or acquaintance to go try out your website and see if they can find anything wrong with it.

Sometimes a simple broken link can easily dismantle your business model, or worse there is a problem with your checkout button or a script has need of debugging.

Have a “What should be there would be there” policy and make sure that everything is accounted for.

Step 3: Imply SEO related modifications

After finishing step 2, you will now have a more clear picture of what you have in your website, how things are processed, where things lead, and what to expect. Now is the perfect time to picture all that in your mind and then imply SEO related practices. Start with the home page and go along with the flow that you knew most people would go to. These are the main pages that should be optimized.

After going through all these pages with the needed changes, look at other pages that you have missed out but are part of the website as a whole. Sometimes even the most belittled page can actually convert for you if presented correctly.

Conclusion

Performing an SEO audit is actually more similar to performing quality assurance to your website but having SEO in mind. It is but important to know the different rules and guidelines to follow in order to make sure that you are not doing anything wrong on your site or at least make sure you are doing what is correct.

When you read specific seo related guidelines sometimes people would tend to over optimize pages which actually then leads to content spamming. Remember, create pages for people to read and not mainly for search engines. These antics can do some good short term but will do more harm to your website in a long term basis.

So the key is when creating a website, focus on it’s creation and objectives – make sure things are in place and is effective then that’s the time you optimize what you can for the search engines.