OFF-SITE SEO CHECKLIST:

WEBSITE CONTROL CHECKLIST:

References:
https://www.reliablesoft.net/how-to-perform-a-seo-audit-of-your-web-site-checklist-included/

 

 

 

 

1. Find Who Your SEO Competitors Are:

You can't analyze your competitors, if you don't know who they are. In some cases identifying your competitors is very easy ‐ for instance, if you have an offline business and you know your competitors there, just check their sites and you are done.

However, in other cases, identifying your competition isn't that easy. Your competitors could be sites in your niche, sites that rank well for your major keywords, or direct competitors for your long tail keywords, etc. The list of your competitors might be a pretty long one and obviously you can't monitor all of them. Perform a search with Google about your target keywords and make a list of the sites/companies that pop high in the search results. You can consider these to be your main competitors.

2.Visit Your Competitors' Sites and Analyze Them:

After you have a list of your competitors ‐ or at least the major ones ‐ the next step is to visit their sites and analyze them. You should be watching if their sites are designed professionally, if they have much content, what the quality of their content is, whether they use static or dynamic URLs, etc. This basic site inspection can give you a lot of information about how professional your competition's Web presence is, hence how likely or unlikely it is search engines to love them.

3.Analyze The Keywords Your Competitors Use:

Keywords have always been the most important factor for SEO success. This is why you can expect that if your competitors are using keywords properly, their site will rank well in search engines. You might have some difficulty identifying the keywords your competition uses because what you think to be top keywords for your niche, might not be on their list at all. If you don't know which keywords they use, try checking if they use your keywords ‐ this is more than nothing.

Alternatively, you can use the Website Keyword Suggestion tool to check which keywords are supposed to do well for their site. While doing the check, you might find many useful keywords you have skipped and start optimizing your site for them.

You should also check the keyword density of your competitors' keywords. The Keyword Desnity Cloud tool will help you get an idea. Also, don't forget to check the location of the keywords ‐ i.e. are there keywords in the headings, metatags, image tags, the URLs, etc.

4.Check the Competition's Backlinks:

Backlinks are the other backbone of good SEO rankings. This is why you need to thoroughly examine the backlinks of the competition. Look for their number and origin, anchor text, etc. and you will get a clue how your competition is doing on this front. Very often you might get some backlink ideas for you ‐ i.e. if you see that your competitors have backlinks from popular sites you didn't know about, contact the webmaster of the popular site to see if you can get backlinks from them, too. The tools you can use are free and some of the best are: Backlink Anchor Text Analysis and Backlink Summary.

5 .Check Other SEO Factors:

Keywords and backlinks are important but they aren't everything. In order to get a thorough idea of how your competition is ranking, you need also to check your competitors' Page Ranks in Google and how they perform in Yahoo and Bing. You should also look at the number of indexed pages the sites of your competitors have with search engines.

6 .Evaluate Your Competition's Presence on Social Media

Social media tend to drive lots of traffic to a site. This is why you can't skip a check how your competitors are doing on social media. Unfortunately, this check is harder to perform. Social bookmarking sites are one of the types of social media and you can start your research from them. Have a look at some of the major social bookmarking sites to see if your competitors have posts there and how popular these posts are.

Twitter and Facebook are two other huge sources of traffic. You can browse to see if your major competitors have profiles at these sites but unless you make friends with them, you will never know what exactly they post. Still, if their profiles have publicly available sections, this gives an idea of what they do on Twitter and Facebook.

7.Analyze How Your Competitors Are Using PPC Ads

Many businesses have figured out that using PPC to drive quality traffic is cheaper and more efficient than optimizing to rank well in natural search results. Google Adwords is the preferred choice for PPC but there are also other networks many webmasters will use. One of the best tools, though it is limited to Google Adwords only, is the Analyze Competition tool by Google. It allows to compare how your PPC is doing in comparison to your competitors' campaigns.

Monitoring your competition is a never ending task. All the activities listed in this article are quite time consuming but if you don't want to be left clueless about the world around you, you do need to take the time and perform the analysis. Even if you see you can't beat the competition, you will certainly learn from them and this will help you be more efficient in your own SEO efforts.

Kavya Purushothaman(1514001)

Learn how to do website SEO analysis or SEO Audit by following website analysis process.

Step 1 – Google Analytics & Webmaster Code

This is the most important step of SEO website analysis . Add or create google analytics code and webmasters code to track the traffic, audience and acquisition details.Google Analytics is essential for tracking the traffic from different channels and know how the audience is connected with web pages of your site. Also, helpful in tracking conversions to the site. Google webmasters are essential to analyze all technical details like crawl errors, broken links, web spam, removing unnecessary URLs, checking robots etc. Also, check Google Analytics guide for more information.

Step 2 – Robots.txt

Create or update robots.txt file and submit the sitemap to it.Your Robots.txt file tells the search engines which pages to access and index on your website on 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 (hopefully) increase the number of pages that it indexes.

Step 3 – HTML & XML Sitemap

Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don’t have a sitemap.

Step 4 – URL Canonicalization

Check whether the website is opening from www or non-www or both. If both then select the preferred domain of the website and also select it in google webmasters. 301 redirect is essential to implement between the http:// and the http://www versions of your website. If you don’t, all the inbound links that point to http://www.example.com won’t pass authority over to http://example.com and vice versa.

Step 5 – Rectify Broken Links

Broken link is basically a page not found an error.It is essential to rectify it because of the following reasons-
 It creates frustration for the user.
 Gives an impression that you are  not monitoring or checking the website regularly.
 It can harm an authority.
 Affects your website conversion if it’s on a sales page.
 Hurt your SEO and page rankings.

Step 6 – Speed Test

Your page should be loaded in 5- 7 seconds for good user experience. Check this with GT metrix tool.

Step – 7- Mobile friendly Version

Mobile users are increasing day by day and having a mobile friendly website is not only good for users but it is also one of the ranking factors Google considers. Install WP touch WordPress mobile plugin to make your website mobile friendly.

Step – 8 – Keyword Research

Keyword is the main activity on which website SEO analysis depends so learn this through keyword research guide.

Step 9 – Meta Tags

It includes title optimization and description optimization. Optimizing the title helps in ranking the website whereas optimizing description helps in increasing the CTR (click through rate) of the website.

Step 10 – Competitor Analysis

It is a very important step of SEO audit to regularly keep an eye on your competitors as it helps in adding missing service or product pages, enhancement additions, trending article topics, keywords, backlinks etc.

Step 11 – Enhancement Related Suggestions

It is very important to add features that create a good user experience. Check the competitor’s website and analyze the add-on features that can be added to the website.

Step 12 – Off-page Optimization/ Link building

Check the domain authority, citation flow, page authority and start link building to maintain the keyword rankings on high authority and high traffic related websites.

1. Identify your potential SEO competitors 

 This initial phase is especially helpful if you're starting with an SEO process for a new client or industry that you don't know anything about, and you need to start from scratch to identify all of the potentially relevant competitors.

 It's important to note that these are not necessarily limited to companies or websites that offer the same type of content, services, or products that you do, but can be any website that competes with you in the search results for your target keywords.

2. Validate your SEO competitors

 Once you have the potential competitors that you have gathered from different relevant sources it's time to validate them, by analyzing and filtering which of those are really already ranking, and to which degree, for the same keywords that you're targeting.

 Additionally, at this stage you'll also expand your list of potential target keywords by performing keyword research. This should use sources beyond the ones that you had already identified coming from your competitors and your current organic search data—sources for which your competitors or yourself are still not ranking, that might represent new opportunities.

3. Compare with your SEO competitors 

 Now that you have your SEO competitors and potential target keywords, you can gather, list, and compare your site to your competitors, using all of the relevant data to select and prioritize those keywords. This will likely include keyword relevance, current rankings, search volume, ranked pages, as well as domains' link popularity, content optimization, and page results characteristics, among others.

4. Select your target keywords 

 It's finally time to analyze the previously gathered data for your own site and your competitors, using the specified criteria to select the best keyword to target for your own situation in the short-, mid-, and long-term during your SEO process: Those with the highest relevance, search volume, and profitability. The best starting point is in rankings where you are competitive from a popularity and content standpoint.

 Tools & data sources

 The data sources and tools—besides the traditional ones from search engines, like their keyword or webmaster tools—that can help you to implement the process (some of them mentioned in the workflow) are:

-Panchal Hinal (1514035)

Every page on your website will display a page title in Google results.

Write plain language, short (less than 512 pixels in length) titles, if possible starting with the most important keyword.

And if you have hours left, spend it on wonderful content. Great content makes the Internet go around. Figure out what your audience finds interesting, spend some time studying the subject and write about it!

A picture is worth a thousand words. From a search engines perspective, this is plain wrong! Perhaps in ten years time it will be, but in 2016 Google still prefers words to any image. Tagging your website’s images gives you an opportunity to explain to Google what the images are about. Depending on the subject of the website, this may bring you visitors through Google image search!

Your website structure can grow into something of a content-tumor with information piling up in corners. Make sure a user can easily navigate to every valuable section of your website. Google can only travel through your website by following the links. Pages that have more incoming links are more important.

Not quite as old as the Bible, hyperlinks are definitely as old as the Internet itself. Google’s existence is based on links and it is still an important factor it getting good ranking results. It works particularly well if the links come from highly trusted sources, such as Wikipedia.

If your content is valuable for others, there is nothing wrong with contacting relevant influential blogs or websites hinting them about linking to your content. However, stay far away from link-trading or pay-for-links schemes, as Google will punish (called “penalize”) your website.

Although Google decides what to display in this section, you can make a suggestion to Google by using the meta-description tag in your HTML. Clear description is important because once you get listed on the search engine results page (SERP), you want to convince the user that your result is better than the ones above and, most certainly, those below you. While Google claims of not using meta-description for ranking, a well written description will help explain the contents of a page to the reader.

‘H1’ is a headline visible on the page and specified as <h1> in HTML. Difference between H1 and meta-title is that the H1 headline is visible on the page, but not on the Google results page, while a meta-title is visible only on the search results. The meta-title and H1 headline should be logically related, as meta-title is like a promise, which the headline and the rest of the page fulfil. In many cases it makes sense to have the same H1 as your page-title, which is just fine, though you are also missing out on an opportunity to diversify your SEO-keywords.