The importance of an SEO Health Check

Getting your website optimised for page 1 listings is probably the focal point of the internet marketing work you do for your site. Its is very important however to periodically check your sites for areas that need updating or corrections from errors that have occurred since you started your SEO, to ensure that it maintains the best position in the rankings that it can.

The purpose of an SEO audit is to source out positive actions that need to be taken to improve you site performance. This should be done at least every 6 months to ensure you website stays current and up to date.

The most important aspects that you must check regularly to ensure you site stays up there with the best are as follows:

Content

Look at your site and answer the question- What do I expect a user of my site will want to find out about? Does this site answer these questions with up to date relevant information?
Anything that needs updating must be done to ensure your site looks actively maintained as this instils confidence in your visitors.

XML Sitemap

The first thing you should do is ensure that your xml site map has been submitted to Webmaster tools. See my last blog on Webmaster tools for details on how this is done. This ensures that Google indexes all of your URLs. Another way to check this is by typing site:www.yoursite.co.uk into Google and it will display all of your pages that it has indexed. This is a good way of identifying which pages haven’t been indexed and that may have potential coding issues that need to be resolved.

Meta tags and Title tags:

It is important that your Meta tags and title tags for each page within your site are different but as content gets added over time these can sometimes get duplicated. You can also check these in webmaster tools in the diagnostics, HTML suggestions tab it will list any meta and title errors that need correcting such as duplicate, to long, or too short.

GATC (Google Analytic Tracking Code)

Do you regulay add new content pages to your site? And do you track your sites performance in Google Analytics? If the answer is yes to both of these you would benefit from checking newer content to ensure that GATC has been inserted into all pages. If this hasn’t been done then any interaction with these pages wont be recorded, making your analytic results flawed and potentially inaccurate.

W3C Validation

Your should also ensure that all pages have had the CSS and HTML code checked that it validates to W3C standards.

Check for Broken Links:

You need to ensure that the users experience of your site is always at its best, else all the SEO in the world wont bring you the conversions you are after. Go over your site and check your links site wide. This can be done easily in Dreamweaver or again in the HTML errors section of Webmaster tools.

Duplicate content check.

To ensure that you site isn’t being copied by anyone else it is always wise to complete a duplicate content check every few months which can easily be done through Copyscape. Duplicate content can result in your site being penalised by Google which will adversely effect your rankings.

Keywords:

Reviewing your keywords periodically is essential to ensure that you are still optimising for the right keywords to bring conversions from your site. There are many ways to check this aspect but the most reliable methods that I use is by looking into your Google analytics. When you look further into the keywords section that visitors have come through to your site sometimes this can highlight keywords that would be of more value that you currently aren’t optimising for. Do be sure to check the search volume of each of these potential keywords in google Adwords before you make big changes. The data generated from your site so far is excellent reliable data that is specific to your site.

Webmaster tools shows the keyword searches that you site has made impressions in the search engine with and this can generate ideas of keyword area you would be better off using too.

If you do decide to revamp your main keyword selections though do the keyword distribution throughout your site with care, you don’t want to make your current SEO worse.

These are just the main points that you should ensure are checked on a regular basis. They wont take up much of your time and will ensure that the health of your site and its SEO remains in check which is essential to ensure that your site and its SEO is always working at it best.

Just as in the written language, there is a right way and a wrong way to write the code that makes a website. Correctly written and valid HTML allows search engines to read the code of a site faster and easier, but with regards to SEO, it can have an even larger impact. Badly coded sites with mistakes in, can be penalized by the programs that check the sites content. Coding mistakes can also lead to your site looking different to different users on different computers. It might look fantastic on your Imac, but it may not work at all on a PC!

So, how do you check that your site is compliant with the standards? We use a tool provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), an international group that works to ensure the long term standards of sites on the web.

http://validator.w3.org/

This page offers some simple to use instructions on how to use the tool. By typing in the website address, the tool will automatically check the site to see if its coding is up to standard.  If there are problems, the tool helpfully shows you where the problem is in the code, and also gives some brief information on how to fix it. After you have altered the code, simply re run the checker to see if the site is now up to standard.
Once the site has been checked and approved, you can add the following icon to the bottom of the web page:-

to let people that visit your site, know that you have taken the time and the trouble to provide a site that fits all the requirements for now, and tomorrow, on the World Wide Web.

For best results in SEO you must start with a cleanly coded website. The search engine spiders will find it easier to crawl and index your site if the code is clean.

There are other benefits of validating your code, these include:

• Cross browser compatibility
• Increased accessibility
• Faster loading times

You will probably find your site will start to climb the rankings once you ensure the site complies with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) web standards. It is important to check each page validates, and every new page you add to your website should be checked.

Validate your code

Use the W3C HTML validator to check your HTML code. The vaildator will give you prompts to help you fix any bugs it finds.

Use the W3C CSS validator to check your CSS. Again, the validator will help you fix any problems it finds.

By making sure your site validates for both HTML and CSS you are ‘future-proofing’ your site, ensuring long term success.

I have been wondering recently how important is W3C compliance? If i had the exact same site one W3C compliant and the other not, would this be reflected in the SERPS?

All the sites that pass through my hands have to be W3C and it is a web standard for Creare. But after a site has been live for a year and various employees have been making changes, there is potentially a chance that the site may no longer be W3C. I believe that W3C compliance does matter and heres why.

• Algorithms, surely they take this into consideration
• Good practice, if there is a standard format that the search engines likes to see, then surely its good practice to adhere to it.
• Dead link, if you have a ‘W3C’ link in the footer of your site, it must be essential to make sure its valid. I guess it’s like having a dead link.

So what if your W3C compliance is invalid and you can’t fix it? talk to someone who can!

Search engine optimisation from creare.