When starting a DIY SEO campaign, you have to
analyze your website to make your SEO campaign as effective as possible. So, how do you become a good website analyzer? Well, it takes practice. In this blog post we will give you a process to follow as you analyze your website. Follow it and decide what works best for you and your company.
Step 1- Google Analytics & Webmaster CodeThis may be the most important step of being a competent website analyzer. You must add or create Google Analytics code and webmasters code to track your traffic, audience, and acquisition details. Don’t fret. It’s not hard. Google helps out significantly. Google Analytics is an essential tool for tracking the traffic from different channels and to know how your audience connected with the webpages on your site. It is also helpful in tracking conversions to the site. Google will help you analyze all the technical details like crawl errors, broken links, spam, the removal of unnecessary URLs and more. Check out Google Analytics for more information.
Step 2 – Robots.txtYou need to create or update your Robots.txt file and submit your sitemap to it. This file is critically important because it tells search engines which pages to access and index on your website and which pages not to. A sitemap is used to give robots a list of pages that it is welcome to visit. By submitting the sitemap, you can increase the number of pages it indexes and improve your visibility on search engines.
Step 3- HTML & XML SitemapThese sitemaps inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect search engines to rush and index changed pages immediately. However, updating your HTML & XML sitemap will push the changes out to the search engines faster especially when compared to not having a sitemap.
Step 4 – URL CanonicalizationIn this step, you’ll want to check whether your website is opening from www or non-www or both. If both, then you should select the preferred domain of the website. Also, update it in your Google webmasters tools. You should use the 301 redirect to implement between the http:// and
http://www versions of your website. If you don’t do this, all the inbound links that point to
http://www.example.com won’t pass their authority over to
http://example.com and vice versa.
Step 5 – Rectify Broken Links
A broken link or dead link is a link on a webpage that does not work. You need to rectify broken links because:
- It creates frustration for the user,
- It gives an impression that you are not monitoring or checking your website regularly,
- It can harm your domain and page authority,
- It can affect your website conversions if it’s a sales page,
- And it can hurt your SEO and page rankings.
By finding and fixing broken links, you are definitely helping your SEO.
Step 6 – Speed TestYour webpages should load in 3-4 seconds for a good user experience. If they do not load that fast, you need to make some changes to your website.
Step 7 – Mobile-Friendly VersionMobile users are increasing daily. You need a mobile-friendly website for your users to have a good experience and for Google to rank you well.
Step 8 – Keyword Research Keywords are the main component on which website SEO analysis depends. We’ve gone over keyword research in other articles. We invite you to check out these articles in our archives.
Step 9 – Meta TagsThis includes title optimization and description optimization. By optimizing the title, you are helping in the search engine ranking of your website. In optimizing the description, you are improving your click through rate (CTR).
Step 10 – Competitor AnalysisWhen being a website analyzer, it is vitally important for you to check out your competition. You can use information from their sites to help you improve yours. Perhaps you’re missing some information. You can easily add it before you launch your SEO campaign.
Step 11 – Off-Page Optimization/Link BuildingYou should check the domain authority, citation flow, page authority and start link building to maintain your keyword rankings with high authority and high traffic websites.
Now, we know that some of these steps will be one-time activities, but we gave you a full website analysis process so you know what you need to do. If some of this seems too technical there are plenty of articles in our blog archives and the web in general that can point you in the right direction as a website analyzer.
Comments
Post a Comment