The importance of an SEO Health Check
Getting your website optimised for page 1 listings is probably the focal point of the internet marketing work you do for your site. Its is very important however to periodically check your sites for areas that need updating or corrections from errors that have occurred since you started your SEO, to ensure that it maintains the best position in the rankings that it can.
The purpose of an SEO audit is to source out positive actions that need to be taken to improve you site performance. This should be done at least every 6 months to ensure you website stays current and up to date.
The most important aspects that you must check regularly to ensure you site stays up there with the best are as follows:
Content
Look at your site and answer the question- What do I expect a user of my site will want to find out about? Does this site answer these questions with up to date relevant information?
Anything that needs updating must be done to ensure your site looks actively maintained as this instils confidence in your visitors.
XML Sitemap
The first thing you should do is ensure that your xml site map has been submitted to Webmaster tools. See my last blog on Webmaster tools for details on how this is done. This ensures that Google indexes all of your URLs. Another way to check this is by typing site:www.yoursite.co.uk into Google and it will display all of your pages that it has indexed. This is a good way of identifying which pages haven’t been indexed and that may have potential coding issues that need to be resolved.
Meta tags and Title tags:
It is important that your Meta tags and title tags for each page within your site are different but as content gets added over time these can sometimes get duplicated. You can also check these in webmaster tools in the diagnostics, HTML suggestions tab it will list any meta and title errors that need correcting such as duplicate, to long, or too short.
GATC (Google Analytic Tracking Code)
Do you regulay add new content pages to your site? And do you track your sites performance in Google Analytics? If the answer is yes to both of these you would benefit from checking newer content to ensure that GATC has been inserted into all pages. If this hasn’t been done then any interaction with these pages wont be recorded, making your analytic results flawed and potentially inaccurate.
W3C Validation
Your should also ensure that all pages have had the CSS and HTML code checked that it validates to W3C standards.
Check for Broken Links:
You need to ensure that the users experience of your site is always at its best, else all the SEO in the world wont bring you the conversions you are after. Go over your site and check your links site wide. This can be done easily in Dreamweaver or again in the HTML errors section of Webmaster tools.
Duplicate content check.
To ensure that you site isn’t being copied by anyone else it is always wise to complete a duplicate content check every few months which can easily be done through Copyscape. Duplicate content can result in your site being penalised by Google which will adversely effect your rankings.
Keywords:
Reviewing your keywords periodically is essential to ensure that you are still optimising for the right keywords to bring conversions from your site. There are many ways to check this aspect but the most reliable methods that I use is by looking into your Google Analytics. When you look further into the keywords section that visitors have come through to your site sometimes this can highlight keywords that would be of more value that you currently aren’t optimising for. Do be sure to check the search volume of each of these potential keywords in Google AdWords before you make big changes. The data generated from your site so far is excellent reliable data that is specific to your site.
Webmaster tools shows the keyword searches that you site has made impressions in the search engine with and this can generate ideas of keyword area you would be better off using too.
If you do decide to revamp your main keyword selections though do the keyword distribution throughout your site with care, you don’t want to make your current SEO worse.
These are just the main points that you should ensure are checked on a regular basis. They wont take up much of your time and will ensure that the health of your internet marketing campaign, website and its SEO remains in check which is essential to ensure that your site and its SEO is always working at it best.
