Uncover your website’s SEO issues in only 15 minutes with our 5 step SEO audit!

Here at the SEO Marketing Workshop we often get asked to do a quick ‘SEO MOT’ of a customer’s website - and highlight where we think the real SEO issues are. (What’s SEO?)

Here we share a few of the issues we look out for - so you can do your own SEO audit yourself, and see if your SEO needs attention too.

1. Is your homepage being served twice?

Does it appear at both http://www.domain.com, and also http://domain.com ? If so you’re serving duplicate versions of your website - not good. Use a 301 redirect to point all versions to a singular, canonical version - this will stop inbound link dilution.

-
2. Take a look at your source code

-
Pick a page, go to ‘View’ in your browser, and click on ‘View Source’ - this is what Google sees when it visits this page on your website. The key things to look for here are your metatags:

• Title Tag - This controls what the ‘title’ of your page is in the search results - make sure it’s short, highly keyword relevant, and will catch a User’s eye in the search results!
• Description Tag - This is the text that appears directly underneath your page title in search engine results - keep it short, snappy and relevant to the page it’s describing!
• Keyword Tag - Whilst this tag carries alot less weight than it used too in Google’s eyes, it’s worth ensuring that each of your site’s pages have unique, relevant keyword tags - but make sure you’re not keyword ’stuffing’ - keep it at around 5 keywords per page - in line with your overall keyword strategy for the site

3. Take a look at your navigation

It’s key to ensure you have a simple, straightforward website structure:

• If possible, keep your navigation links as text (rather than images/ javascript etc.) - so Google can easily read them
• Make sure your navigation is logical and as ‘neat’ as possible - avoid long, complicated URLs, and ensure your keyword for each page is in its URL - eg. www.seomarketingworkshop.com/news
• Make sure you use the correct anchor text for every hyperlink - ie. don’t hyperlink words like ‘click here’, hyperlink relevant keywords such as ‘latest news’

4. How’s your content looking?

Content if King for Google! Have you got the right sort of website content?

• Have you got plenty of content for Google and your customers to read? Fresh, regular, keyword relevant content is key to organic ranking success
• Add a sitemap to your website to help Google crawl all your content - ensure you use keywords in the anchor text - and all the major category and sub-category pages are listed here
• Check there’s no hidden text on the page (a popular black-hat SEO technique - you might get in trouble for this) - Use CTRL - A to look for it
• Is your content correctly structured? Are you using H1s and H2s? Use headlines and bulleting where possible - using these help Google to understand the structure of your content, and its relative importance

5. What about linking?

Do a quick Audit of your internal and inbound links:

• Are all your pages interlinked as much as possible? Ensure that pages with a high PageRank link to those with lower PageRanks - this will increase their authority in Google’s eyes
• Use FireFox’s SEO Quake extension to check your inbound link count in Yahoo - how many have you got? From how many different sites? What sort of PageRank do these sites have? Are they relevant information communities? Inbound links from relevant, authoratative websites are key to SEO success

So there you go - the 15 minute SEO Audit. If you’ve tried some of these and found problems, then get in touch now for cost-effective support in getting them fixed.

Our Launch Package will cost-effectively sort all these issues for you - and will ensure your website has a fantastic chance of SEO succcess.