If your website isn’t performing as well as you had hoped, this is a quick audit checklist which may boost its rankings. If you carry out this audit every 3 months, you will ensure your website ranks well.
- Keywords
Does your website contain the keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines? Long tail Keywords are the most effective. These are 3 or 4 keywords within a phrase specific to your industry i.e. “website designers in Sligo” as opposed to “Sligo websites”. You can be penalised if you attempt to use the same keywords for two pages of your website so make your keywords specific for each page.
- Content
You will be penalised for duplicate content or content taken from other sites. The keyword should also feature in the heading, first paragraph, meta description, URL structure, alt text of the first image used and towards the end of the content. Blogs are key as this can really help with keeping your content fresh. See also content writing for your website.
If your content is too short, this can also affect rankings.
- Broken Links
Backlinks (links to other web pages of websites) and links within your site which are broken will be detrimental to your site. Backlinks must be relevant to your site and of high quality.
- Site Security
If you site is an ecommerce website, an SSL certificate is now a determining factor in ranking your website.
- Images Optimised
All your images need to be re-sized so that they do not slow up the speed of your website. If a customer has to wait more than 5 seconds for a website to load, you know that they will go to another site. All the images need to have the alt text tab.
- Sitemap
All websites should have a sitemap which helps enables Google to understand the structure of your website.
- URLs
Make sure all the urls on your website have been optimised to ensure correct SEO.
- Website Speed
The loading speed of your website has become a critical tool as customers want results to their searches and queries quickly. This also needs to be checked for your mobile website too. Large images and videos can cause websites to load too slowly and you may need to stop them showing on your mobile site if this is the case.
If you have any questions on the above, call Lisa or Jon at Format.ie Web Design Sligo on 071 9131991.
