How a Free Website Audit Can Improve SEO
Are you looking to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website?
If so, there are a few key steps you can take to help boost your site’s visibility and performance in search engine results.
In this post, we’ll discus how you can quickly audit your website for free and why it will help your website’s performance in search engines.
You can take your free audit and allow a SEO company to fix it, or you can hire Empirical Web Solutions, a science, health, and medical internet marketing agency in Oklahoma City to do it for you.
Let’s begin.
Shine Ranker Tool
How Does The Tool Work?
The Shine Ranker tool crawls every page of your website to determine if your site is obeying Google’s SEO guidelines.
Here are a few key things these web crawlers look for.
- Is There an Active Google Analytics Account?
- Is There an Active Google Search Console Account?
- Is there an SSL Certificate?
- Is Page Speed Optimal?
- Are Meta Descriptions Present?
- Which Pages are Indexed?
- What are the Canonical URLs?
- Are H1 Titles Present? If Do They Match Your Target Keyword?
Don’t panic if this technical jargon is over your head. I will explain what each is and why you would want to optimize each.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console Accounts
Anyone looking to improve the SEO of their website should have a Google Analytics and Google Search Console account.
These free Google tools provide valuable insights into your website’s performance, such as how much traffic it receives, where that traffic comes from, and what keywords people use to find your site.
You can use this data to identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions about how to optimize your site.
SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) is a digital certificate that is used to establish a secure, encrypted connection between a web server and a web browser. This is significant because it helps to protect sensitive information transmitted between the two, such as credit card numbers and personal data.
Any website that collects or transmits sensitive information, such as e-commerce sites and online banks, must have an SSL certificate. Without an SSL certificate, third parties can intercept and read information transmitted between the website and its visitors, potentially leading to identity theft or other forms of cybercrime.
An SSL certificate, in addition to providing security for sensitive information, can improve a website’s search engine rankings.
Many search engines, including Google, favor sites that use SSL certificates because they are perceived as more trustworthy and secure. This can help to improve a website’s visibility in search engine results, ultimately driving more organic traffic to the site.
In summary, an SSL certificate is an important tool for ensuring a website’s security and trustworthiness. An SSL certificate helps to protect sensitive information and improve a website’s search engine rankings by establishing a secure, encrypted connection between a web server and a web browser.
Page Speed
Page speed is an important factor in improving the SEO of your website. Search engines prioritize webpages that load quickly, so if your site takes a long time to load, it may be affecting your potential to rank high in search results.
You can improve page speed by optimizing your images, minify your code, and reduce the number of redirects on your site, to name a few.
Meta Descriptions and H1 Headers
Another important aspect of SEO is the use of meta descriptions and H1 headers with keywords. Meta descriptions are the short snippets of text that appear below your website’s title in search engine results.
These descriptions should be concise and informative, and should include your target keywords to improve the relevance of your site to those keywords. H1 headers, on the other hand, are the main headlines on your website and should also include your target keywords to signal to search engines what your content is about.
Page Indexation
Webpage indexation, also known as web indexing or indexing a webpage, refers to the process of adding a webpage to a search engine’s index. This index is a database of all the webpages that the search engine has discovered and deemed relevant and trustworthy enough to include in its search results.
When a search engine crawls the web, it follows links from one page to another, discovering new pages and adding them to its index. This process is known as crawling and indexing. Once a page has been added to the index, it is eligible to appear in search engine results for relevant queries.
Having your webpage indexed by a search engine can help you rank in search results for relevant keywords. When a user searches for a particular term, the search engine will look through its index and return a list of webpages that it believes are relevant to the query. The pages that rank highest in the search results are the ones that the search engine considers to be the most relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy.
To improve your chances of ranking in search results, it’s important to optimize your webpage for search engines. This can include things like using relevant keywords in your content, optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions, and improving your site’s overall user experience. By doing these things, you can help search engines understand the relevance and quality of your content, which can in turn improve your chances of ranking in search results.
Canonical URLs
A canonical URL is a way of specifying the preferred version of a webpage when there are multiple pages with similar or duplicate content. This is important because search engines treat each URL as a separate page, so having multiple pages with the same or similar content can cause confusion and make it difficult for search engines to determine which page to rank in search results.
By specifying a canonical URL, a website owner can tell search engines which page to prioritize when indexing and ranking pages with similar or duplicate content. This can help to improve the search engine rankings of the canonical page, as it tells the search engine that the specified page is the preferred version of the content and should be the one that appears in search results.
For example, let’s say you have a website that sells shoes and you have multiple pages that describe the same shoe in different colors. Without a canonical URL, the search engine may not know which page to rank in search results for a particular query, leading to confusion and potentially lower rankings. By specifying a canonical URL, you can tell the search engine which page to prioritize, helping to improve its chances of ranking in search results.
In short, a canonical URL is a way of specifying the preferred version of a webpage with similar or duplicate content. By using canonical URLs, website owners can help search engines understand which pages to prioritize, which can in turn improve their chances of ranking in search engine results.
H1 Title Tags
An H1 title tag is the main headline of a webpage. It is the most important piece of content on the page and is typically displayed in a larger font size than the rest of the content on the page.
H1 title tags are important for SEO because they help search engines understand the main topic of a webpage. By including a relevant keyword in the H1 title tag, a website owner can signal to search engines what the page is about and what keyword they are trying to rank for in search results.
Having the H1 title tag match the keyword you’re trying to rank for is important because it helps search engines understand the relevance of your content to that keyword. If the H1 title tag does not match the target keyword, the search engine may not understand the relevance of your content to the keyword, which can hinder your ability to rank well in search results.
In short, an H1 title tag is the main headline of a webpage and is an important factor in SEO. By including a relevant keyword in the H1 title tag and ensuring that it matches the keyword you’re trying to rank for, you can help search engines understand the relevance of your content and improve your chances of ranking well in search engine results.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many steps you can take to improve the SEO of your website. From setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to optimizing your page speed, meta descriptions, and H1 headers, there are a multitude of factors that can impact your site’s performance in search engine results. By taking the time to carefully analyze and address these issues, you can improve your website’s SEO and drive more organic traffic to your site.