One of the best way to appeal search engines is for your website to follow their guidelines. But to rank higher on their SERPs is never an easy task, and sometimes can also be unpredictable.
When you have your website up and running for a certain amount of time, you may consider auditing it to know how or why it fails in certain criteria. In SEO perpective, there should be something that has gone wrong, and things that you failed to see.
But the thing is, any added/removed feature or even adding a new simple keyword on your title tag and header can have further effects to how your website will perform on search engines.
To understand the effect of any changes, you need to know the factors that search engines take into account when determining your position on their SERPs. Some of the main criteria is as follow:
- Content quality of the page.
- Authority and how the contents can or have effect to users.
- The structure of your website and its accessibility.
- Responsiveness and speed on the overall website.
To improve the points above, you should perform a quality audit. Depending on the size on your website, an in-depth audit can take from a couple of hours to a few days, or even more.
Crawl Your Website To Understand It
Before you start auditing and diagnosing, you need to know what your're dealing with. The first to know, is a basic understanding of your website, how it was designed and how it was developed.
After knowing how your website was created, the next thing is to crawl your website like how search engines would. Start by navigating your website using your website's navigation menu. Try each link and see where it's pointing you. Check on each link and see whether there are problems encountered.
This should be easy for small websites with only a few pages. But for those that are larger and when you want a deeper insight, you may need some tools to aid you. Using those tools, you can also get more insights about your pages, like their metadata, title length, HTML tags, W3C validation issues, and so forth.
Prioritize Accessibility Above Others
As a website that needs to be online 24/7, it should be accessible no matter what. Simply put, if search engines and your visitors can't access your website, the resources you put on designing your landing page and also marketing will be practically worthless.
Accessibility is essentially one of the most influential parts of a website audit. Failing here can uncover significant future problems to how your website is performing on search engines.
Since most websites on the web depend on search engines for new organic traffic, you need to make sure that search engines are capable of crawling your website. To do this, the first thing to audit is your website's robots.txt file. This file specifies which of your website's pages search engines are allowed to crawl. If you want search engines to crawl your website properly, only disallow certain sections of your website that you don't want the public to know.
The next thing to look, is how your pages' HTTP status codes. For example, you need to solve 404 issues and make sure that your links are pointing to the right page by using redirect 301 or 302 when necessary.
In addition to errors, you may need to take a closer look at your website's XML sitemap. Sitemaps provide a path for search engines to easily find all of your pages on your website. If there are pages listed in the sitemap that do not appear in the crawl, it could mean that you need to find a location for them in the site architecture and ensure they have at least one internal backlink.
The last thing is to constantly monitor your website's performance and uptime. Make sure that your website is loading as fast as it can by designing and developing it properly. You also need to make sure that your web server is capable of serving all of the traffic.
Take A Closer Look At On-Page Ranking Factors
Your website has a lot of things under its sleeves, and here you need to know how each and every of them perform.
As a start, you need to audit the contents of your website's pages. Contents are the things that make your website worthy to search engines, and it's the ultimate reason why people on the web are visiting your website. Here, you need to make sure that your content's foundation level is stellar and authentic.
The next thing to look is how your contents perform from an SEO standpoint. Things to keep in mind include:
- Is your content worthy enough to read? Is it long enough/detailed/thorough to answer people's question?
- Does it provide value to readers? Did you put well-written topics into your contents that are relevant to your visitors?
- Images that go along with your content, are they optimized? Do they have the metadata search engines need to factor them into your rankings?
- What keywords are your targeting? Have you done prior research before determining the best keywords for your website and its pages?
- How's your website's web design? Does it make your contents to stand out and readable?
- Can search engines index and crawl your contents without issues?
When you're taking a close look at your website's on-page ranking factors, you need to also know the harmful mistakes and errors that can affect your ranking. They include duplicate contents, keywords cannibalism, and others.
The last thing to consider, is your outbound links. When you're auditing your website, you need to make sure that those links that point to external websites do work and point to trustworthy, reputable sites.
Improving Off-Page Optimization And Ranking Factors
After digging into your on-page ranking factors, you need to also take a look at your off-page ranking factors. While these factors are from external sources, they are still vital to your rankings.
The first thing to do is to look at your overall popularity: you need to know how much traffic your website is having by regularly analyzing your analytics software. You need to make sure that you're not losing any significant amount of organic traffic from search engines after any changes you've made to your website.
The next is to know your website's credibility in the competition. To do this, you need to compare your website's popularity against those that use a similar platform to yours. You can also measure your website's popularity by knowing how many backlinks your website is having.
One advise when auditing your backlinks, always look for untrustworthy behavior like spam or malware. Prioritize any backlink pointing to your website that uses keyword stuffing, cloaking or hidden text. If you found any backlink that uses methods that search engines don't like, you can disavow those links so they won't affect your website's rank.
The last thing to consider is your website's social engagement. As social media is becoming an important part of the web, search engines are including signals from them as their ranking factors.
Each social platform has its own form of social currency (likes, retweets, shares and so on). When you're evaluating social interactions, you need to know how well your website and its pages get those currencies.
Conclusion
Auditing your website will give you a wealth of information about how your website is and how it should perform. And if any errors are encountered, you can quickly address them before they cause any further damage.
Search engines are known to change and update their algorithms frequently, with most of the time doing so without prior notice. For that particular reason, you need to keep up with the trends and update your website with newer technology (or version) whenever they are available and applicable. This won't just ensure a better security for your website and its users, but also to make sure that your website complies with the newer trends.
Having yourself updated with the current information is one of the best way to avoid any further mistakes by picking up valuable tips from others.