Do-It-Yourself Route To Auditing Your Website’s Onsite SEO

Auditing a website’s onsite SEO practices can be difficult with little or no relevance given to it. I just finished my own website’s audit and while the process takes a while going through the motions with a checklist in hand, it fixed a lot of issues I did not know about and probably were hampering my rankings.

There are many factors that sum up perfect onsite optimization, and one must be thorough with each one of them. Offsite SEO won’t be as effective as you want it to, if these problems are left unsolved and the gravity of each unsolved issue might compound to another whole level with time. So, here is how you perform a comprehensive onsite audit by yourself.

Broken Links

Use Screaming Frog to check for broken links on your website. Screaming frog will crawl through your website, page by page, and report to you all links with invalid URLs. You must change the URLs with valid ones or remove those links entirely. Screaming Frog also provides tools for other steps of the process that we’ll discuss later.

Sitemap Integrity

A sitemap is a well-formed structured data referencing to the pages that you want search engines to crawl. There may be some pages that are not linked to anything, which can only be found via the sitemap, hence its necessity. The best way to do this is to generate a new sitemap. A tool named Xenu Link Sleuth is the perfect tool for this job and you may use that along with many other to generate sitemaps in a variety of formats including Google’s essential XML sitemap.

Fix 404s - save the embarrassment

Sometimes Google finds an imaginary page on your website (or so they say). They page may have been there in the past, or not at all. Still Google thinks it’s there and shows it in the results. Now Google is disappointed at the 404 error since the page wasn’t found this time around, so you need to fix this. Assuming you’ve got Google Webmasters Tools or as they call it ‘Search Console’ hooked onto your website, just click on Crawl and then go to Crawl Errors section. You’ll find all the Google Violations you’ve committed. To fix them, you need to either create a page on that URL or redirect it an existing page with the same topic.

Beware Duplicate Content

Use Copyscape to scan each URL of your website and find any duplicate content you may have posted on your website. Any form of plagiarism is penalized by Google and you must make sure you are not plagiarizing someone’s content. The best approach in such a scenario is to delete the page found to be plagiarizing someone’s content, and publish one on the same topic a few days later.

Thin Content Devalues Your Website

Any webpage with under 300 words of content is considered thin. You must either combine all thin content pages or remove the ones which are not absolutely essential.

Content & Factual Errors

There are two types of errors that can crop up in content; grammatical and factual. Grammatical errors require some proofreading to fix, and it’s a simple fix to make. Just make sure you update your “last updated” date in your sitemap, so Google knows to reindex the page with the error-free version.

Factual errors are a bit harder to deal with. If your page is old and what it says was factual at the time, you don’t need to do anything except maybe add a disclaimer that the advice is out of date. It’s also an opportunity to create new, updated content, if it’s still relevant. The choice is yours.

There’s a major caveat with content; it gets outdated. The things to get updated are either grammatical errors you’ve published or facts and figures that may have been outdated with time. Both need to be corrected.

The above covers all major onsite optimization processes and once you’re done with it, your website shall be able to get the maximum benefit from SEO techniques and marketing.