SEO AUDITS - PALM BEACH to THE FLORIDA KEYS

THE SEO AUDIT

By David Meade

In order to have a preeminent website, time should be spent developing a profile of the health of your website.  Continually auditing a site can produce exceptional results – an upwardly mobile ranking in the search results.

Performing a full search engine optimization audit of your website on a regular basis, perhaps at least once every six months, or at the most annually, is key to maintaining your web presence and maintaining your organic search engine rankings. There are a variety of reasons why you really need to perform a full SEO audit of your website:

• Algorithms are constantly updated
• The rules change from year to year
•  Content on your site changes
• You need to remediate problem areas
• Your website rankings haven't changed and you would like some more business
• You need a fresh set of eyes that can take a look
• It helps your business grow with an extremely small investment

These are key principles to follow after the release of the Penguin and Panda algorithms – proper use of this information can save you thousands of dollars of revenue per month on your websites.  This is a compilation of critical success factors needed to function on the Web – an all-in-one document essential for successful operations.

1. Websites should have at least six pages of well written content of 400-800 words per page and lots of related keywords on those pages.
2. Websites need a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page.
3. Websites should have customer reviews or customer testimonials.
4. Websites need an About Us page with pictures and a history of the business.
5. WordPress sites with the All in One SEO Plugin installed and switched on are favored.
6. Keyword density of 2 to 5% - anything over 5% is too much.
7. Streamlined website structure (not too many ads on the upper fold).
8. No duplicate content or if so under a minimal amount.
9. Excess use of search tags at the bottom of a web page (with keywords listed) is voted against by this algorithm.
10. Although Google ignores meta keywords, if you list more than 2-4 it can lead to a penalty.
11. The keywords tag isn’t used by search engines and in fact actually gives your competitors data on the keywords you are targeting.
12. Internal link errors – broken links will penalize a site.

The Panda algorithm appeared in 2011 (Penguin in 2012) – it also requires websites to be informative.  Fresh and on-point content is a key.  I’ve known many people, for example, in the real estate industry who update the demographic narratives annually or semi-annually on their site to keep up with this requirement.  For example, they may be involved in a ten-city area, and need 10,000 words of fresh copy (1,000 words per city) to add to their residential and commercial opportunity section of their website in order to offer new information to their clientele.

The Panda algorithm can detect when links are placed in an unnatural order.  This is penalized. The Panda algorithm analyzes the logic of all of the backlinks as well. Finally, “cloaked” pages where the reader sees one result and the robot sees another are of course penalized under this algorithm.

 Website Audit Findings

During a website audit we often find problems and we thought it might be useful to give examples of typical issues.

These are some common problem areas – but only an SEO Audit of a particular site can determine the full range of issues and recommendations.

A website owner should treat the top part of each web page as prime space. That’s the part that appears before a visitor needs to scroll down the page. On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, images should be used that convey the right impression to the visitor. Using graphics and abstract imagery is fine but really the message needs to be on-point.

Often the file sizes of the imagery on the website are much larger than they need to be or should be.  Google prefers a two-second load time and often the imagery slows this down tremendously.

We recommend you buy your registration for your domain name for ten years in advance – Google goes to Internic.com in order to do a search to verify how long you registered your website for. Google assumes a long-term registration means you are a professional company. Name.com and GoDaddy.com are excellent sites for registering your website. 

In terms of an IP address, there are two types – shared and unique.  If you share an IP Address with others on a server, their actions can reduce your ranking.  We recommend you use a Unique IP Address.  This typically runs another five dollars a month.

In terms of appearance, a couple of rules – do not underline extensively, and do not use all caps.  Never use long blocks of text.  Break them up with white space for the readers.

Of course never use text from another website – you can generate ideas, but all copy should be totally original.

Always write to your readers – introduce them to you as a person. 

On average, images make up 40 - 50 percent of the average web page, so it is important to minimize their impact on loading time, as mentioned.   Choosing the appropriate web-based format for your images is a major step. GIFs, JPEGs, and PNGs are the formats used to display images on Web pages.

In general, palette-based formats like GIF or PNG are best for flat-color art like buttons and logos. For smooth-toned images like photographs JPEGs are the best choice.

Google doesn’t like drop-down menus.  Hidden buttons are often not indexed.  Users often lose their way.  It’s avoidable and a good idea to not use this form of design.

Important pages include a FAQ Page, an About Us Page & a Privacy Policy Page.

Sponsored links are not recommended – 95% of the people on the Internet do not read them.  The key is to get a high organic ranking.  I do not recommend PPC advertisements or sponsored links.  I don’t own a phone book, either – I consider it unnecessary and so do the majority of Americans.  Dollar for dollar a website that ranks well far outweighs these other types of advertising.

Many websites we audit fail to make proper use of page titles and descriptions. The page title and meta description used in the top HTML header of every page is very important to Google as well as to the other major search engines.

Google in particular makes frequent use of the page title and meta description of each webpage in their search listings. It is important to observe the formatting of page titles for Google, and display no more than 70 characters in the title and 160 characters in the description.

Remember that the search engines -Google in particular - do not like duplicate page titles and descriptions.

A website should funnel as many site visitors to their key pages as possible. Web designers or web owners often design the site-wide navigation so that many links point to non-essential pages.  This will weaken the Page Rank (PR).

Optimize your key landing pages.

Typical issues are:

• A clear headline or sub-headline is necessary – often use a question for the headline – that’s very effective
• No clear indicator of what the web page is about
• Excess links and distractions on the web page
• No clear flow of content
• The Unique Selling Proposition must be clearly stated at the top
• You need content that will build trust with the visitor
• The order process must be very simple

Other common issues are:

• Non-utilization of target keywords and phrases
• Non-relevant keywords in page titles & descriptions
• Anchor text without keyword use
• Non-use of keywords in the page URL
• The theme and navigation flow are difficult to follow

Technical issues often include:

• Missing - robots text file used by the search engine’s crawlers
• Missing - search engine sitemap
• Excessive use of Flash content
• Excessive use of frames in page design
• The use of dynamic links rather than static links
• Broken or missing links to web pages

If these problems persist, search engines may not cause the page to get indexed properly, or it may not be indexed at all. If web pages are slow to load, Google is less likely to deep crawl your site with its robot. 

The SEO Audit Report

A complete SEO Audit Report should be run initially and annually.  It is normally a single-spaced report that is close to 20 pages in length (at least ours are), and it should contain the topics following as well as at least a one-paragraph description of what each topic entails and then recommendations for remediation:

1. Title Analysis
2. Description Analysis
3. Keywords Test
4. Headings Test
5. Robots Test
6. Sitemap Test
7. Favicon Test
8. Code to Text Ratio
9. URL SEO Friendly Test
10. Google Analytics Test
11. Underscores in Links Test
12. Google Page Rank Test
13. Alexa Page Rank Test
14. Image Alt Test
15. Media Print Test
16. HTML Page Size Test
17. HTML Compression Test
18. Page Cache Test
19. Flash Test
20. Nested Tables Test
21. Doctype Test
22. Site Loading Speed Test
23. URL Canonicalization Test
24. Directory Browsing Test
25. Server Signature Test
26. Plaintext Emails Test
27. Safe Browsing Test
28. Social Media Test

Regular SEO Audits will show you your progress and give you a track record for what works and doesn’t work.

About Us

David Meade is an International Freelance SEO Consultant based in Florida.  He has written half a dozen books and is also a copywriter. He can be reached at: DavidMeade7777@gmail.com

His website:

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Email us at DavidMeade7777@gmail.com:
info@DavidMeade.

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links to products are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. Please understand that I have experience with all of these companies, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to buy something.