How To Improve Organic Search Results With A Simple Site Audit

Having a search engine friendly website, a site with no barriers to the search engines is critical to success within “organic” search engine results.

In this article I wrote for Search Engine Land there are some relatively simple SEO Site Review steps that should help you flush out the most important site wide issues within a small to mid size website.

What You’ll Learn:

When to Conduct a SEO Site Review

A SEO site review or audit should be conducted periodically such as after a website is redesigned or after a major update, anytime organic search engine traffic takes a significant drop, or during a during site redesign.

How to Examine Files Indexed In Search Engines

Check for issues such as files that shouldn’t be indexed, old pages that are still up and getting indexed, less than ideal use of HTML Page Titles or Meta Description tags, content from include pages, pop-ups, or frames that are getting indexed without the surrounding navigation, etc.

Check The Number Of Pages Indexed. Too few files or too many files indexed can both point to issues.

Ensure Site Navigation Links Can Be Followed. Links that can’t be followed can hurt page rankings and result in pages being crawled less often for changes.

Check A Sample Of Important Pages On The Site. See if they are indexed and look for problems such as duplicate content or paths and whether the content of pages is not getting indexed.

Use Google’s Webmaster Tools

Check Google’s Webmaster Tools for issues such as duplicate HTML Page Titles and Description Tags, problems with the Robots.txt file, and internal linking

Read “How To
Improve Organic Search Results With A Simple Site Audit”