Search engine optimization is the one word you hear when it comes to managing your website and gaining traffic. Is SEO really important when it comes to running an online business with a website? The answer is yes! Search engines like Google and Bing can easily crawl the websites which are structured and indexed well. Technical SEO includes all the practices which maximize the site usability for the potential customers.

An SEO audit is required to check what factors are hindering the progress of your website. This audit assesses how search engine friendly your site is, and helps you to identify the technical issues which are preventing your site’s visibility. For bloggers and non-developers with low technical skills, SEO audit is a better way to implement the changes. Optimizing all the technical issues will rectify the mistakes and improve your website chance at getting better results.

Crawling/Indexing

In order to show the website in Search engine result pages, search engines need to be able to crawl and index your pages. Utilizing sitemaps helps to list every URL on your site by which search engines can easily crawl your site content. The other text files which help crawlers tell if they can or cannot access content are robots.txt files. Optimize them to your convenience and select which data you need to give access.

Check the pages which are indexed by search engines at domain.com that will give the number of pages which are disallowed for indexing. Review the pages and make sure that all the important resources can be crawlable.

URL Optimization

In search engines like websites with short URLs you can add explanatory content. Title tag and Meta descriptions come later with detailed information. Having unnaturally long URLs with non-ASCII characters is sure to cause the indexation problems. Do not change URLs if they are performing well irrespective of the length.

If a URL is changed it will create a 301 redirect from the new site to old site and it does not always send positive vibes to the audience. It will directly affect the rankings for a period of time. Change the URLs if your website is not performing well. Never over optimize the URLs or stuff keywords into them. It will cause more damage to your site than help.

URLs should demonstrate site structure and hierarchy to perform well. Use hyphens to separate words than underscores as Google cannot recognize underscores so it treats it as a single word.

Speed of Website

The performance of the website is the biggest ranking factor when it comes to SERPs. The website and pages in it should load fast as it is the key to retain the audience or consumers. A slow site is defiantly bad for conversions, and Google do not rank such sites to be on top even if they have great content.

There are a lot of ways to optimize and speed up a website. The pages do not load faster mainly because of the heavy images and plug-ins used. Remove all the unnecessary widgets and ads which slow down your network. Simplify the codes and keep only the necessary coding to run the site. Setting a browser’s cache increases the website speed as it remembers the pages which are frequently visited.

Duplicate Content

Google actually penalizes websites for duplicate content quality. The main reason for this issue is that having duplicate content confuses the search engines when they are trying to find relevant searches for given keyword. Having duplicate content slows down website traffic too. Take the help of Google search console to find duplicate content under Meta descriptions and title tags too. Rewrite or remove the duplicate content for every single page and image. Though the process takes very long duration it is very important to identify duplicate content and optimize it.

Mobile Friendly

With a lot of marketing and blogs shifting their base from desktop to mobile use, Google has decided to rank pages with mobile-first indexing. It means that websites will be ranked based on how compatible they are with mobile viewing. It is very important to optimize your website to responsive designs to make it mobile-friendly.

Mobile optimization involves optimizing website design, loading time of the pages, the structure of the site and the ease of access from mobiles. Simplify the website design and remove unnecessary plug-ins which are not mobile compatible. Make use of HTML instead of Flash to create special effects as flash does not run on all mobiles.

Content Optimization

An SEO audit should definitely check the content quality and optimize every page of the website. Even if the site has strong content it should be effectively optimized to drive more traffic. It should be absolutely necessary to check if the keyword is in the title as it is very important. The keyword should possibly appear once in the Meta description and first paragraph too.

The SEO audit checks if the content is unique and original first. Creative content with good ideas get ranked higher. The uploaded content should be informative, useful and relevant to the topic discussed on the page. The content should always be directed at the consumer and engage them till the end.

This SEO checklist is mostly directed at non-developers with minimum technical knowledge. With lots of analytical tools available on the internet for free, it is very much possible to optimize their websites with some effort and time.

 

Author’s Bio: I’m currently working as Content Manager with Web World Experts. I have a great passion for digital marketing and I help small and medium-sized businesses improve their online presence and grow their revenue by formulating effective digital marketing strategies for them. Apart from Digital Marketing, I have the keen interest in Web Development, Web Design, Graphic Design, Web Application Development technology, etc.