Technical SEO Audit of Your Website

Written by: Gary Horsman

Technical SEO Audit of Your Website

Best Practice SEO

You need to make sure that you have covered the basics when you consider your search engine optimization approach. There is a great deal to the content marketing and SEO puzzle and you need to ensure that you have the essentials covered before moving to more complex issues.

It may be time for you to conduct an SEO Audit of your website.

Content marketing is essential but a large part of content marketing is visibility where your clients and potential clients are looking. Without search exposure then your content marketing efforts can fall flat or not reach their full potential.

What can you do to improve your content search visibility? The answer to that question is to start with a technical SEO audit.

Search engine optimization is a bit of a moving target as it involves a mix of influences. According to Google Webmaster Central more than 200 variables are used when ranking web content Google’s focus is on the quality of the site and Google provides plenty of guidance (1).

Moreover, Google states that at any given time there may be 50 to 200 versions of its core algorithm in operation so the notion of anyone having a complete handle on exactly what to do to reverse engineer Google’s method of ranking website pages and blog posts with any significant degree of predictability are not realistic.

What is best is to understand the basic intent of the major search engines. Their basic intent is to provide valuable information based on the term being used to search and to provide a good and proper user experience. To understand this basic motivation enable us, as content marketers, to plan, optimize and promote content that is relevant to both search engines and search engine customers. If done properly and well then the search engine customers may become your customers.

Best practice search engine optimization involves a mix of attention to keywords, content related to these keywords, links, social factors and factors that relate to the human experience such as page load speed and ease of layout.

When I am asked where to start I typically answer that a great place to start is with a technical SEO audit. There is no specific agreed upon standard definition for a SEO audit but the essence of it is an evaluation of a website from the perspective of a search engine.

Search engines get the information you see in the search results by operating software program called bots (or spiders) which follow links from page to page on the web. The capture the page content as they move from page to page. The content that the search engine bots copy is then organized into an index from which the search engine results that you see when you search are presented.

If there are difficulties or even inefficiencies with the process of the search engine bot doing its job then it can mean that web pages are not crawled or not indexed properly and thus either not included in the search results or perhaps not in the right place in the search results.

A technical SEO audit is one of many types of several SEO audits. A technical SEO audit can help to determine the readiness and effectiveness of a website or blog. It is often the best starting point and can identify many opportunities for on-site optimization that should be done before moving into more complex areas.

(1) Link to Google Webmaster Central