Before you begin, you need to crawl your site. This determines if you have sections on your website that cannot be accessed by search engines. If you don’t have the former, means you are not ranking good on the search engines as well or no rank at all, because they are not present in their databases itself. For crawling your site, you need a tool like Search Engine Spider Stimulator tool. It helps in determining what is indexable and what is not or you can hire an SEO service company to look after this department for you.
- Determine the site accessibility and indexability
- Check if you have not blocked crawlers from your site. For that, check Robots.txt to see if there are no sections banned in your site. For the same you can use Google Webmaster Tools.
- Next, you should check the 404 errors and where they are redirected. When crawling your site, keep an eye on such errors and address them immediately. Always use good redirects.
- Then check the XML Sitemap if they are updated, readable and functioning. They must always have pages that should be indexed and included in the sitemap as well. ensure that the XML map is submitted to search engines.
- When it comes to availability, you cannot neglect site architecture, loading speed, uptime, and use of Flash or JavaScript. When it comes to accessibility, you need to check what is listed below.
- Check the number of pages being indexed by search engines. The easiest way to do it by typing site:yoursite.com. This determines the number of pages being indexed by the search engines. If the number is near to actual number of pages of your site then it is a good sign, if not then your pages are inaccessible and you need to address this issue immediately.
- Analyze on page ranking factors
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- Site URLs must always be user friendly, they must bear relevant keyword and no overlap.
- Page content takes a lot of time to SEO audit. Consider important points like, if your content is just a few words or lines, is unique, is keyword rich, has keywords placed at the right place, if you have duplicate content on any other page etc.
- You need to be careful about the quality and quantity of outbound links as well. Hence, see if you have no more than 1 outbound link per 500 to 1000 words. You can also use nofollow for outbound links but this doesn’t give the guarantee as well.
