SEO Health Check – Why an SEO Audit is Important
An SEO audit is not only important for the assessment of a website before optimising (the website) but also for ongoing Search Engine Optimisation.
Optimising a website or doing an SEO audit is like servicing a car; you need to have regular checkups and finetune your car to make sure that it is running properly. Likewise, a website needs to be regularly maintained and tweaked to check and improve the SEO of the website. Google released a report of their SEO to identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages. So isn’t it about time you did an SEO health check of your website?
Competitive keyword selection
Constant monitoring of keyword selection is important for the ongoing optimisation of your website. Realistically, you should do a website analysis and check the keywords you should be targeting every six to 12 months to see if they are the best keywords that you should be aiming for. Find out more about Keyword Research Tools and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your keyword strategy.
SEO copywriting & on page content
It’s always a good idea to go back and check your on page content from time to time and cast a critical eye over your content regularly. Look for opportunities where you can add fresh content to your website and update your content. Websites that are always reviewing, testing, monitoring and rewriting their content achieve strong conversion rates:
Find out more about SEO copywriting and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your copywriting and on page content.
Images
Image SEO is often overlooked on a website but searches on Google Images are also an important referrer of traffic to websites. Always keep in mind that Search Engines cannot read images, they can only read text. This makes optimising images all the more important to maximise every bit of your website SEO. Find out more about image SEO and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your website images.
Link Profile
Link building and maintaining your link profile is an essential part of SEO so checking your profile is an important part of the SEO audit. It’s also important to focus on your link building strategies. To create a natural link profile, you need to check anchor links have different variations, the type of links must include both dofollow and nofollow links and the links pointing to your website must be from a quality website related to your industry that is credible and trustworthy.
Internal link structure
It’s also important to check the links on your pages and how they measure up. The first thing you need to do is check whether there are dead links on the page by seeing what links come up with a 404 error. This is an important part of your SEO audit as Search Engines prefer websites that are well maintained.
Webmaster Tools makes it easier for you to detect whether the 404 errors or crawl errors are limited to your website or from external websites. You’ll have the information you need to contact them to get it fixed, and if needed, you can still put in place redirects on your own site to the appropriate URL.
Site speed
Google recently announced that site speed would be included in the search ranking algorithms. Site speed reflects how quickly each web page responds to web requests. Intensive research on site speed done by Google shows that users have a tendency to spend less time on a site that is running slowly.
Google has also blogged about free tools as part of your SEO audit that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site performance and how this affects your Search Engine ranking. However, while Google sees site speed as relevant, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page in Search Engine rankings.
Contact us to find out how we can conduct a full SEO audit of your website. This may be needed when you have just created a website, if your website suddenly loses traffic or your traffic is not growing steadily. The website analysis starts from a 50 point checklist of your current website, rankings and competitive analysis. From there, we’ll be able to customise an SEO program to suit your needs and budget. Doing an SEO audit of your website is a good risk management strategy and ideally should be done every six to 12 months.
Latest SEO Developments – Search Engine Evolution
2010 is shaping up to be an interesting year for Search Engine Optimisation and the never ending quest for market domination. The first quarter is coming to a close and we have already seen some major developments with Search Engines technology. Here is our heads up on what to expect for the rest of 2010…
Binghoo – Microsoft and Yahoo join forces
It was announced mid last year (29 July 2009) that Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces to take on the Search Engine giant Google. It is potentially going to be an 80/20 world for the Search Engines we predict as early as 2012 with Binghoo finally presenting some decent competition to Google in the Search Engine wars … but does combining two ordinary Search Engines make one good Search Engine – time will only tell. The real beneficiary of this relationship could be Ask.com who may stand a chance if the merger proves to be a bad move.
End to Site Explorer
The news is that the merger will see the end of Site Explorer. Sadly the portal to link information is likely not to be supported once Yahoo stops investing in maintaining their web index. Thankfully, SEOmoz have released their newly developed link popularity checker and backlink analysis tool aptly named Open Site Explorer.
Soft launch of Google Caffeine in the next few months
Google made an announcement late last year that the launch of a new Search Engine algorithm Google Caffeine would be launched early this year. According to reports, at this stage, it is only one data center and expected to roll out over the coming months.
Different to Google’s regular updates, our research has indicated that it will be a restructure of the calculations that Google uses to try and speed up the Google Search Engine and may not necessarily be a major change to the Google ranking algorithms. Google is unlikely to make a huge announcement that the algorithm has been changed.
Google Personalised Search is here to stay
Google Personalised Search launched in December 2009 is apparently here to stay. Personalised search uses your web searching and viewing history to deliver search results based on the things you’ve searched for on Google and the sites you’ve visited so you are served the search results that are most relevant to you.
Although the roll out in December received little attention, this is definitely shaping up to be a hot topic for 2010. However, Google’s follow up announcement about their extension of Personalised Search options to users who aren’t signed-in to their Google account created another round of buzz in the SEO industry.
Depending on how Google implements Personalised Search in the coming year, this may have a major impact on SEO and local businesses as Search Engine results are tailored to each user based on previous web history. However it is interesting to note that although Personalised Search was officially launched late last year, it has been in existence for a while now with people in different regions getting different Search Engine results based on locality.
The significance for SEO companies is that there should be a renewed focus on geo-marketing and link building activities. Social media networks and cross promotional opportunities and tactics will continue to gain more relevance in generating organic traffic to websites as well as concentrating on developing great content that will result in return visits to websites.
Google Personalised Search has yet to make a major impact on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS) but both the SEO industry and businesses alike should see this is as a challenge and opportunity to develop websites that encourage brand loyalty, repeat purchasers and increased conversion rates.
The end of Real Time Search as we know it
On the other hand, Real Time Search is turning out to be a big fizzer. After only 1.5 weeks of launch, the Twitter real-time updates turning up in the Search Engines seems to have created more negative media attention than good. An eye tracking study of Real Time Search results done by OneUpWeb consisted of two key groups; consumers and information foragers. The study showed that:
- 73% had never heard of real-time results before participating in this study;
- consumer intent drives first fixations: the consumer group averaged 9 seconds to the view the real-time results, where as the information foragers took a full 14 seconds;
- only 55% of the participants could easily find the real-time results;
- the majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results.
- In an effort to get the jump on its Search Engine competitors, Google may have released Real Time Search too quickly. It is already turning up less and less for search queries and it probably won’t be long until the engineers at Google go back to the drawing board.
Google Buzz creates no buzz
Google Buzz was launched in early February this year. It is Google’s push into social media and is integrated with your existing Gmail account. An autosuggest feature nominates people to follow who are already connected to your account. Buzz appears as an extra tab in your Gmail inbox and allows you to post content and share files from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader.
After the initial launch, Google was forced to respond to public feedback and made some quick adjustments:
- The automatic following feature of your Gmail contacts was replaced with an auto suggestion feature.
- Google Buzz no longer connected with your public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items automatically.
- A Buzz tab was added to Gmail Settings so users could hide Buzz from Gmail or disable it completely.
It is yet to see whether Google Buzz will be able to take a chunk out of Facebook and Twitter’s market share or whether Google has left their run too late.
Launch of Google URL shortening service
Google have now launched an URL shortening service. The service is called the Google URL Shortener although it is currently only available for Google products and not for broader consumer use. This timely announcement was made only one day before bit.ly launched their PRO service. This will be a wait and see if Google can compete with bit.ly who has already gained a huge market share for their products.
At SEO Works, our SEO Experts are constantly doing research, reading blogs and websites, going to SEO conferences so we can keep abreast of changes in Search Engine Optimisation and provide you with the best SEO Services. Contact us if you are interested in Search Engine Optimisation and our SEO Consultants will help you increase your Search Engine visibility, increase your conversion rate and maximise your return on investment.
