Website Audit – 8 SEO Tips for Beginning a Website Audit.

What areas should you focus on when starting an audit of your website?

Here are 8 important SEO factors that might take into consideration when conducting a website audit of your competitors.

1. Domain age

Many of  your competitors may have been around a long time and have built a lot of authority in their websites  giving them good SEO rankings. This can be quite daunting when you are trying to enter the same market space that they occupy. However, it might not be as hard as you think to knock them off their perch.

They may have only a few good quality back links which could make it easier to overtake them in Google’s search page listings. Although you can’t compete on domain age, (assuming you’re not going to buy an aged domain and pay through the nose for it!), you can complete on creativity. Developing great content, building personality and strategic content syndication have always being ways to differentiate your business.

2. Page rank website/page rank webpage

Just because your competitor has a homepage rank of 6 and you might have a homepage rank of 3 doesn’t necessarily mean that they will always rank above you. Building quality ‘on topic’ backlinks can give your content more relevance and ultimately better rankings.

Promoting individual web pages or your unique blog posts can attract a lot of backlinks just to those pages. Building a lot of backlinks to unique pages or posts will influence your page’s strength as measured by Google. See which websites are back linking to your competitors websites and check if you can from a link partnership with them.

You can check your competitors backlinks using Interleado’s SEO Workbench, or through Yahoo, in the search box type  site:www.mydomainname  and you will get a backlink list.

3. Keyword link text

Having good quality back links is vital for your website’s authority and your seo ranking. The best type of backlink is one from a high authority website. Back links from sites with a low page rank  and of little relevance will not be of much benefit to your business. This is why the automated process of back linking can be a waste of time and give you very little ROI.

Backlinks achieved naturally from high authority website’s with relevant link text can only consistently be achieved on merit. Gone are the days when you used to be able to buy your way to tons of quality backlinks. Google’s ever tougher stance on paying for links is making that particular SEO tactic more blackhat than whitehat – is it worth the risk?

As I said it’s important that a good smattering of the anchor text from your backlinks contain keywords that you have targeted for your businesses key word strategy.  As you know your backlinks should be aligned with a professional Internet Marketing Strategy.

4. Tld (Top Level Domain)

Having the country code in your TLD (top level domain) can be a factor in attaining a better SEO ranking.  It may impact the search engine ranking of your site depending on the geographical location of the person who  “Google’s” a query related to your website. If your competitors operate world wide, why not set up a cctld,  (Country Code Top Level Domain). This could significantly enhance your SEO ranking for local search.

If you had a website called: “www.myinvestments.co.uk”, it’s ranking for the key term “financial investments online” would vary based on the location of the searcher and whether he or she is using different Google country-based search engines. 

If you are targeting a specific country, then make use of the country code TLD of your targeted country. However, if you do target several countries, using a country code TLD is not advisable; instead, use a generic TLD such as .com, .net, or .org.

Or better still, for brand protection and for your organic SEO strategy , buy all the names for  your domains, i.e. mydomain.com, .co.uk, .net, .org, .com.au…etc You can then use Google Webmaster Tools to target different countries, but make sure you setup that permanent 301 redirect.

5. Keyword URL.

One way to help compete for very popular keyword searches is to put individual keywords in the URL’s of different website pages. Google gives this some attention and can have an impact on your SEO ranking for particular keywords. In this example our key word phrase is “Learn Internet Marketing”, e.g. http://www.interterleado.com/learn-internet-marketing.php

6. Meta tags:

Google now pays less attention to the Keyword meta tags for indexing purposes, but the Title and Description tags are still quite important.  If you do manage to get a good rank for a web page, whatever you put in your description and title tags may be visible to the searcher and is probably what’s going to entice them to click on that URL in the first place. See the snippet below, how effective and precise a Title and description should be for a searcher browsing the web.

7. Keywords in alt text

One of the simplest ways to make your Web site more relevant is to use an alt text in your image tags. You should put keywords in your alt text. When Google scans your webpage it takes alt text into account, which may give you chances further visibility in vertical search website, e,g, Google image searches or in Flickr. It also helps with accessibility, blind or visually impaired users  can understand what the images are about and help with their understanding of the web page when appropriate alt text is used..

8. Body text

A web page with a large Flash animations and graphics usually seen on corporate sites, are the best example of how to not optimize your site for Search Engines. Search engines have difficulty reading the text in a graphics. In most cases there is no need for using graphic buttons or image maps in the navigation links.

You should optimize your web pages by using keyword phrases, so the search engines will know what products or services that you are selling. It is good to start sentences with your keyword phrases. it’s important to write keyword-rich content that focuses on the ‘theme’ for that particular page, while avoiding spamming the engines with extraneous keywords.

Page text should be written in a ‘natural’ way that reads well to the user. Don’t just stuff the keywords in your text.  Pick 2/3 keywords per page and optimise for those keywords.  If you are using your keywords too often, search engines may penalize your site and flag you as spam.

Have you optimized your website correctly?

Have you done a website audit on  your own recently?What kind of factors did you examine?

Tips by email

Tips by RSS

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.