If your website has been around awhile, running an audit to see how to improve your SEO can help you increase its rankings in the search engine pages. This is something that should be done periodically even if you have had professional SEO services because the search engines change their ranking requirements to the point that what used to work even a year and a half ago may not work as well for you today in regard to how you design your site to appeal to the engines.
Website content is the first thing you should check over. If your past content was mostly about loading your site down with keywords, you will probably want to edit that content to have less keywords and more high quality information. Ideally, you will offer content that people will want to share and interact with. Keywords are still important, but only 2 to 3% of your overall content should be based on keywords.
Title tags are the next important part of your website to audit. The best title tags will be under 70 characters and should be directly relevant to the content and include a keyword, if it is relevant. The key is whether it is relevant or not because if it isn’t, then it makes no sense to have the keyword there and the search engines will not favor sites that have keywords with no relevant content on the page. When you are checking your title tags, you can then check your URL structure. Use static URL names that again, are relevant to the content it is representing.
The next best thing you can do when you are checking through your website pages is to add noticeable social integration. Not only are sharing, Like and Google +1 buttons convenient to keep readers engaged and sharing information with their followers, they help SEO as well.
As you audit to site to make sure you have high quality content on every page, without too many keywords, relevant title tags, static URL names and social integration you will be boosting your website’s appeal the search engines. Keep an eye on your analytics to see how these improvements equate to better SEO and continue to make changes or improvements based around what your analytic reports are reflecting. Remember, it can take anywhere from four to six weeks for the search engines to reindex your web pages, so it may take that amount of time for the improvements you make to start showing up.
