Doing a Website Audit in 4 Easy Steps

Doing a website audit is an essential part of making the most of your online assets. Website audits are like a SWOT analysis of your website, you want to find out what its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are.

It would be too much to cover all aspects of such an audit in this post, so I am simply starting with the main aspects of an SEO focused audit. This means you will be looking at whether your on-page optimisation is fit for the search engines and whether it will contribute to better search engine rankings.

Keywords

Keywords are the beginning and the end of your SEO strategy. Once you have done your keyword research and decided on the best keyword, you will need to include it in your website. As a rule of thumb, you want to include it in about 2 percent of the website text, meaning you mention your keyword twice in every hundred words. Your keywords or key phrase should also be included in your websites title tag, description and meta tags.

Internal Links

A very powerful, but often disregarded strategy to increase search engine rankings is internal linking. You should include as many internal links as you can, while still keeping it natural. A good goal might be to have three internal links for each webpage or blog post on your site. Make sure the internal links spread out to all of your pages and blog posts rather than just your homepage. You also need to pay attention to the anchor text, which is the text that people click on that links to another page. You should use the keyword phrase you have used to optimise each individual webpage and blog posts to link to that page. For example, you click on the word ‘swiss watches’ from one of your web pages and you land on another page that is optimised for the keyword ‘swiss watches’.

Sitemap

Building on the importance of internal linking, you should include a sitemap on your website. A sitemap helps the search engine robots to understand what content is on your site. In addition it creates internal links which help with your SEO ranking.

Search engine friendly URLS

When someone starts their own website, they often pay a lot of attention to the domain name, and rightly so. If possible, the domain name should include your core keyword in it. But unfortunately, this is often where the attention to the URL stops. In many cases, subpages of the domain are simply named with IDs and other code, such as example.com/index.php?id=19 To increase your chances of higher search engine rankings, and make your own website audit complete, you should change these links to include your keywords and look like this example.com/keyword-phrase.html

If this sounds a little bit complicated to you, you can decide to use a well-established SEO software to do your own website audit for you. The audit will be done in minutes and give you a great step-by-step program to increase your search engine rankings.