Below are few things that one should keep in mind while doing website audit or website analysis –
1. ‘WWW’ Resolve / Home Page URL Canonicalisation
Priority: HIGH
Your website without www should redirect to www (or the opposite). Otherwise it can lead to duplicate content!
Redirecting requests from a non-preferred domain is important because search engines consider URLs with and without “www” as two different websites.If its not happening, then you need to implement 301(Permanent) redirection in order to get complete link value from non-www domain.
2. URL Structure
Priority: HIGH
URL should be easy to remember and user-friendly. URL path should not have more than 3 levels. Very important for easy navigation of users and search engine crawlers. URL should not contain parameters like “?” , “=“ . They are not readable by search engine like Google. URL structure should be clean and should have included the path that webpage is following.
You can also include keywords into url to get SEO ranking value . See highlighted in URL. It can be replaced with any desired keyword.Also, use hyphen(-) in URLs instead of underscores (_) as hyphens acts as a word separator and set of words with underscore are considered as a single word by Google.
3. Page Title
Priority: HIGH
Optimize it according to Google webmaster guidelines. Add unique title to each page. Include your keywords in page titles.
4. Meta Description
Priority: HIGH
Optimize it according to Google webmaster guidelines, for each page uniquely. Include your keywords.
5. Optimize your HTML for H1 and H2 headers
Priority: HIGH
Each page should have one <H1> tag which includes your keyword you want your site optimize for.
6. Robots.txt File
Priority: MODERATE
Include & optimize robots.txt file on website root folder. It helps in to block unwanted pages from indexing on Google.
7. XML Sitemap
Priority: HIGH
Create and upload an XML sitemap.Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.
8. Page Speed
Priority: HIGH
Implement best practice from Google to address issues flagged by Page Speed Tool. Ex. Google’s PageSpeed Tool
9. Image Alt Texts
Priority: MODERATE
Optimise image alt tags to include target keywords for the pages on which they exist.
10. Keywords in Image Filenames
Priority: LOW
Optimise image filenames to include target keywords for the pages on which they exist.
11. Duplicate Content
Priority: HIGH
Remove duplicate pages. Add canonical for desired pages. Implement redirection if required.
12. Link Analysis
Priority: HIGH
Resolve broken links. Optimize external links. Do research for quality backlinks. Maintain proper distribution of dofollow and nofollow links.
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