Most websites acquire errors and other SEO defects over time even if good care was taken while creating it. Most people optimize their websites for search engines once and relax forever. A website or blog that is continuously updated will obviously gather some negatives over time and it is necessary to perform an SEO audit once in a while. An SEO audit is basically a procedure for checking a website against standard SEO practices and finding any other technical errors on the site.
If you have been ignoring your website for some time now, you would need to do an SEO audit soon. You can either do it yourself or hire a local professional firm like this one located in Phoenix, Arizona. In either case, it is always better to know what all it entails. So, let’s see how to perform an SEO audit to improve your website’s performance.
Check your site load speed
In Google’s search algorithm, the loading speed of a website is of high priority and it can also affect your precious conversion. Improperly formatted images, heavy JavaScript and flash are notorious for slowing down a website. You can use Google page insights tool to get some idea about the loading speed of your website. It will analyze your site and even give you tips to help improve the loading speed. Google recommends a webpage to load in 1.4 seconds and if you can make it, you should be on the safer side.
Assess your link strategy
Make sure your inbound links are clean and from authority sites. Disavow all links from low quality sites. You should obviously make sure that you don’t link to low quality sites as well and in case if you want to link to one, use the nofollow tag to tell Google that you don’t endorse it. If there are any broken links on your site, fix them immediately as crawlers tend to leave a website when they face a broken link. You can use screaming frog tool to check both inbound and outbound links of your website.
Check your keywords and images
Keywords are an essential part of your onpage SEO and if you haven’t focused on them, you are losing traffic for sure. Google’s keyword planner tool might be the best to check your keywords and get an insight of what you are missing out. It is also important to check your title tags for proper structure and make sure it has the right keywords in place. Check your H2 tags to be sure that they have human readable headings. Also, check if your image alt tags are well optimized and they are not left blank. Since search engines can’t read images, alt tags are a must to describe them.
Eliminate coding errors
Validating your website’s code is a great way to improve the experience of search bots on your site. Since search engine bots find complicated scripts difficult to read, it is recommended that you streamline the code or simplify it. This not only eliminates errors, but also improves your site’s loading speed. It is also mandatory to check for http errors on your site and fix them. Every page on your website should give an http status code of 200 and if it does, your site is in good health. Besides, all other design imperfections on the site should be fixed for user experience and compatibility across different browsers.
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