On-Page SEO Website Audit – How to Proceed

The importance of search engine optimization (SEO) is widely understood at this point. In fact, it is important to make sure that SEO is strong at the very beginning of a new project. An SEO audit is critical at first.

The strength of your SEO

When you first begin your new project, it is extremely important to do an SEO audit so that you understand the strength of your optimization and thus understand how to proceed. At this point in your project, you have a couple of options. It is important to remember that you need to approach the audit in a methodical manner. Plan your approach in advance and do it logically.

• You can do a fast hit website audit. With this approach, you drill through a top-level diagnosis and it won’t take you more than a few hours. If you decide to be more thorough, you can conduct a much more extensive website audit, which might take several days.

If you decide to conduct an extensive website audit, there are a few different areas in which you should concentrate. Those areas are:

• Technical site audit
• Link audit
• On-page SEO audit

If you decide to conduct an on-page SEO audit, you will want to start with the title and meta-description of your tags. You should be prepared for the fact that the document that you create as a result of this audit may be very long and very detailed. You may want to consider creating a spreadsheet with your website categories and pages in rows. Your headers should be represented by each element of your on-page SEO. At this point, you may be asking which elements are important enough to include in your audit, why they are important enough to include and what you should be looking for.

Title tags

The reason that you have title tags is so that the content of each page is unique. Since you want each of your website’s pages to be unique, each of your title tags must be unique also. Title tags are extremely important when it comes to search engine rankings so it is very important to put a great deal of creative thought into writing your title tags. Your title tags must include strong keywords, which are relevant to the content on that particular page. Another element that must be included in your title tag is your business’s name. This is essential because numerous websites put their business’s name at the very beginning of their title tags.

Absent title tags

Aside from writing effective, unique title tags, it is important to be aware of missing title tags or incomplete title tags. There are several helpful tools to help you make sure that your title tags are exactly what you need them to be.

Meta tags

You can consider a meta tag as an advertisement for your business. It is important that you remember to give a good description of your content for that particular page. If you do the meta tag correctly, the end result will be that more people will click on your website when they are conducting a search. The better  your meta tags, the more people will pay attention to you and your business. On the other hand, make sure that your descriptions are not too long. A maximum of 200 characters is sufficient.

Repeat title tags

If you have repeat (or duplicate) tags, you need to identify them and eliminate them. Your unique tags are what will get you noticed. It is critical to your success.

Cannibalization and keyword mapping

As you are conducting your SEO on-page audit, you will possibly discover more than one use of the same keyword on more than one page. This is not a good situation because

• It may confuse the search engines regarding which of your pages should be ranked first.
• This will cause you to miss possible opportunities to increase the number of keywords that you are optimizing.

Conclusion

An on-page SEO audit is critical to the success of your business. Without search engine optimization, you won’t be a success and with the competition being so stiff, you need as strong an edge as possible. It is critical that you entice people and get them to want to interact with you and to eventually become your clients. You want to make sure that you present valuable information that is well received and powerful. The audit will help you to achieve that.

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