If you are in the field of SEO, you will know the importance of the SEO Audit. While you take a website , you can never stop your improvisation for a website, you will find some changes always for the better performance of a website.
One of my junior who has just joined our team asked me today “how to perform a SEO audit for an website”, so i thought to create a checklist in short about SEO Audit, This blog would be helpful for the SEO’s who are at the beginning stage.
Checklists for Your SEO Audit:
- Crawling and Auditing your Website is important and the major one.
- Crawl your website URL by entering into any crawling tool.
- Your crawling tool should be able to scan every resources like Javascript, CSS, Image, Flash, Video on your website.
- Based on the size of your website your crawling time also differs.
- Check for the issues in crawling and indexing
- Check your sitemap. After updating it check for the errors in google search console.
- Crawl -> Sitemap -> Add/Test Sitemap -> Enter the website URL -> Test
- Check for robots.txt
- Check whether any important pages are being blocked.
- Add an allow rule in order for the page to get indexed.
- Check for the Errors in the Website.
- HTTP response code errors are the most occurred and are the major reasons for the indexing errors.
- You can check the crawl error by going to Crawl -> Crawl Errors in google search console.
- Ask Search engines to recrawl your web pages.
- Avoid common redirects like 301, 302 etc for your web pages.
- Replace every temporary redirects (302) with permanent redirects (301)
- Every meta refresh has to be removed from the page.
- Check for rel=”canonical” issues in your web page.
- Find all the HTML and CSS errors and fix it.
- Fix all your internal, external links in the right path
- Limit the number of redirects and outgoing links.
- Dynamic URL’s ,must be user friendly. because most of the default ones will be difficult to read.
- Keeping URL short and sweet is important because URL with 35 to 40 characters dominate search listings.
- Broken links must be fixed.
- Check all your meta tags, Heading tags, title tags are perfectly matching the guidelines.
- Title should contain 50 to 60 characters and 150 – 160 characters for the Meta Description.
- Duplicate title and meta description will fail you.
- Keep a heading tag, thinking of the search term.
- Content is the king everywhere so optimize your content perfectly.
- Check how many images are in your website.Check for broken images and you have added alt text for all your images.
Hope this Checklist will gain you and help you to practice more. Every developers should keep this checklist in mind before they start.
Do you think if any more technique has to be included in the checklist? Then let me know in the comment section below.