DIY SEO Audits - Give Your Site a Check-Up
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SEMPO Canada Search Summit 2013 DIY SEO Audits - Give Your Site a Check-Up Rob Woods
description
Have your own site? Are you an online marketer that doesn't do SEO? This shows you how to do a high level SEO audit on your site, fix simple issues and tells you when to get a pro involved.
Transcript of DIY SEO Audits - Give Your Site a Check-Up
SEMPO Canada Search Summit 2013
DIY SEO Audits - Give Your Site a Check-Up
Rob Woods
Who Am I? 13 years of online marketing and product merchandizing
experience in e-commerce and affiliate marketing Worked in all facets of online marketing with a focus on SEO,
Social, and Content 2 years with Reinvent an in-house incubator for one of the
largest domainers in the world (blackfriday.com) Technical Editor of two upcoming search books from O’Reilly Run my own SEO consulting business (3 years)
Why Do Your Own SEO Audit? Diagnose issues that might be holding you back Professional audits from great auditors can have a wait list Professional audits can be expensive (esp. if they are good) - $1,500 to $35,000 Uncover simple to correct problems Tell you when to get a pro involved
Limits of DIY Audits Problems may be very complex Indicate problems but not solutions Solutions may be complex It takes experience to prioritize problems and solutions Generally limited to on-site issues
Getting Started – Home Page Duplicate versions of home page (50% of small sites) Try clicking on your logo. Does it link to the “right” version? Remove (or add) www. Does site resolve to “right” version? .Net tends to have duplicate at /default.aspx Can be a pain to fix with some CMS Creates dupe content and dilutes link equity Fix and 301 redirect
Getting Started – Home Page
Getting Started – High Level Pages Home, Major Sections, Major Categories Navigation (Where and how much) Number of outgoing links Copy and internal links View Google Cache / Text Cache View without Java and Images
View Google Cache / Text Cache Does the saved version of the page look right? When was it last cached?
View Google Cache / Text Cache
View Google Cache / Text Cache
View Bing Cache
View Bing Cache
Cached Pages Shortcut SEOBook Toolbar
View without Javascript and Images This is how the bots will generally see your pages Do they still make sense? Can link be followed? Can you get to all the content Easiest way to set this is using SEOMoz Toolbar
View without Javascript and Images
Getting Started – Titles and Meta Descriptions Check your title tags and meta descriptions for top pages Titles affect SEO Meta Descriptions only affect CTR from SERPs Lots of tools (below) for getting titles Quick check: Look at your SERP listings or in the top bar of your browser Titles like: domain.com, keyword1, keword2, keyword3, keyword4, keyword5 from domain.comdomain.com are not optimal
Title Tag Best Practices◦ Use your brand name at the end of every title tag, if at all,
although it should be tested. ◦ Place most important keywords prominently – at the
beginning of the tag◦ Limit length – should be somewhere around 60-70 characters◦ Be focused on appropriate keyword targets – “every keyword
possibly related to the page” approach won’t work. ◦ Limit superfluous text – use a divider to separate terms◦ Incorporate keywords and phrases◦ Try to make them compelling with a call to action◦ Every tag on the site should be unique
Meta Description Tag Best Practices◦ Each page should use a unique meta description that
reflects the theme of the page and ideally, conveys a value proposition.
◦ Meta description tags have limits. Currently Google displays up to 156 characters, Yahoo! up to 161 and Bing up to 150+
◦ Keywords in the description do not affect rankings but can affect CTR as they get bolded
Webmaster Tools Bing Webmaster Tools http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster Google Webmaster Tools https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools Set these up and wait a few days File upload, Meta tags, DNS, WordPress Plugins
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools - Health Crawl Errors
Google Webmaster Tools - Health
Google Webmaster Tools - Health
Google Webmaster Tools - Health Crawl Stats
Google Webmaster Tools – Optimization Sitemaps
Google Webmaster Tools – Optimization Go back and check – Index Status
Index Status and Duplicate Content 156, 938 pages in sitemaps (how many you think you have) 3,012,391 indexed by Google (how many they think you have) Possible duplicate content issue The reverse indicates crawling access issues To see which pages are indexed search site:domain.com in Google Tip you can exclude via site:example.com –example.com/search=
Google Webmaster Tools – HTML Improvements
Bing Webmaster Tools – Configure My Site
Bing Webmaster Tools – Reports & Data
Bing Webmaster Tools – Diagnostics & Tools
The Search Engines Search for your brand. Are you ranking #1?
SEOMOZ Pro Dashboard http://www.seomoz.org/ Free for 30 days then $99 / mo for 5 sites Lots of good tools for diagnosing problems Other good tools included – Site Explorer (links), Follower Wonk, Rank Tracking, Social tracking One caveat is SEOMoz will crawl pages the search engine bots don’t Limit ourselves to the Crawl Diagnostic tool
SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics
SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics
SEOMOZ – Duplicate Titles
SEOMOZ – Duplicate Titles
SEOMOZ – On Page Links
SEOMOZ – On Page Links
SEOMOZ – On Page Optimization
Screaming Frog http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ Crawls your site from an SEO perspective Up to 500 pages is free (over that 99 pounds / year) Errors | Redirects | External Links | URI Issue | Duplicate Pages | Meta Description | H1 / H2 |Meta Robots | Canonical link element & canonical HTTP headers | File Size | Page Depth Level | Inlinks – All pages linking to a URI | Outlinks – All pages a URI links out to | Anchor Text | Follow & Nofollow | Images – Images over 100kb, missing alt text, alt text over 100 characters
Screaming Frog
URIVALET.com Great for testing redirects / server codes (301, 404) Overview of meta tags and title tag Direct link to W3C HTML Validation tool Good for diagnosing page speed issues
URIVALET.com
URIVALET.com
URIVALET.com
HTML Validation http://validator.w3.org Doesn’t always affect ranking but it could Can affect browser compatibility and accessibility Facebook markup is not valid
Page Speed Page speed IS now a ranking factor Page speed has ALWAYS been a conversion factor
Page Speed
Page Speed Firebug https://getfirebug.com/ Yslow http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ Google Analytics: Content > Site Speed Most page speed issues are not DIY fixes
Penalties and Algo Updates Lots of talk about penalties lately Understand the difference between a penalty and an update Penalties can be recovered from by specific actions Algo updates usually take sitewide changes and a long time
Panda First appeared Feb 2011 Built in to constant updates now Affects sites with thin content, lots of pages, few deep links
Penguin First appeared Apr 2012 Caused by off-site factors Affects sites with obvious link building
Penalties Usually Google based Manual penalties “usually” also get a WMT message Good source of diagnosing http://panguintool.com/
Images Can be a good source of organic traffic Optimize your alt attributes and title attributes Make them as small a file as still looks good Don’t resize big pics, shrink before you use them Include width and height attributes if possible For lots of pics create and upload an image site map http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636
Link Audit Lots of good backlink tools incl. SEOMoz Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Google WMT, Bing WMT If doing SEOMoz anyway, use it Top reports to run: Inbound Links, Compare Domains, Anchor Text, Top Pages
Next Steps Don’t Panic! Start with easy steps Check your home page for duplicates Configure Bing and Google Webmaster Tools Download Screaming Frog Sign up for free month of SEOMoz If necessary, consult a specialist
Educational Resources Bing Blogs http://www.bing.com/blogs/webmaster/default.aspxGoogle Webmaster Central http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/ SEOMoz Blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog Webmaster World http://www.webmasterworld.com/home.htm SEMPO Learning Center http://www.sempo.org/?page=learning_center Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/
Thank You!Rob Woods
Follow Me on Twitter: @robdwoods
Email me for this deck: [email protected]
Skype: rob.d.woods
604.374.5312
http://www.linkedin.com/in/robwoods
