Website Audits: Building your website for search engines
At Nation1, my employer, we like to start all our clients SEO campaigns with a good old audit of what search engines actually think of your website. The audit is sort of like a websites health check and it’s good to know what’s wrong and if there are any issues that may arise.
Website Technology
The first thing search engines will request and see, before they get to the content of your website, is technological responses from your server. They will then analyse the documents within your website by extracting content and other information within your pages.
Having your technology set up incorrectly can lead to search engines being unable to read your website, extract the content of your website inefficiently extract and analyse your content.
The first stage of any SEO campaign is to ensure that the server, and website, are returning information to the search engines in the best ways possible. This will allow us to have a string technological foundation upon which to develop an effective SEO campaign.
Unspiderable Elements
Within a website there are a number of common elements that search engines are unable to read. The main elements are either image based or technological aspects of a website that cannot be effectively understood.
Images are very popular within websites. They improve the user experience and can enhance the user journey through a site. Unfortunately search engines, and visually impaired users, cannot understand these effectively.
An accessible option is available to improve the usability of images by search engines and visually impaired users. By placing an alt attribute upon images a text narrative to images can be provided. These are used by some search engines as a way to determine relevance for a page, but should also be supplied to ensure that your website complies with Disability Discrimination legislation in the UK.
Javascript
JavaScript is used in many websites to make them more dynamic and exciting. JavaScript runs on the users’ machine, the computer requesting the page. This means the computer has to be able to process the JavaScript file.
Search engines do not process JavaScript and read only the code provided.
If you have menus in JavaScript or content controlled by JavaScript it can be invisible to search engines and visually impaired users.
The solution to this is to provide an HTML equivalent to all objects that are dynamically included such as flash, or = dynamic menu systems or analytics system. The NoScript convention should be used as an alternative option for these objects . The content that is contained within the <noscript>…</noscript> tags will not be displayed unless a user has JavaScript disabled or not installed.
Flash is an image based display system for aspects of websites. Flash enhances the user experience if used effectively, but as search engines cannot read images they require an alternative version of the contents.
Flash should be written in JavaScript to ensure that appropriate browsers and website users receive appropriate content. Text only browsers have JavaScript disabled and do not receive the Flash movie as a result.
A NoScript alternative to the Flash should be provided in all instances.
HTTP headers are sent by your server to anything that requests the page before the page of HTML code is returned. Search Engines and browsers all analyse these to discover the status of a webpage. Having an incorrect status returned for web pages can lead to devaluing of your website and ineffective search engine spidering.
All that a search engine can read is the code that sits behind your website. It cannot see the pictures, it cannot see the layout. All it has is the code to analyse.
Within HTML there are strict rules on how a webpage should be produced, from a coding perspective. Search engines anticipate that web pages will be built using valid coding. If a page contain invalid coding some search engines can have difficulty understanding the intention of your web pages. Invalid code can result in lower search engine positions –the coding issues require to be examined on a case by case basis.
Websites filled with dense coding can be difficult for some search engines to spider. By lowering the amount of HTML code in a webpage it can be possible to improve the natural search engine positions of website documents. Web pages that use minimal coding will have a high content to code ratio.
Domain Record
Domain Records tell web browsers and search engines the physical location of your server. If your domain records are incorrect neither will know where to look for your site and will not be able to locate it efficiently.
Bad Neighbourhood Servers
A Bad Neighbourhood server is a server that contains websites that are poorly trusted by the major search engines. For example sharing a host with a lot of spam filled sites or sites that contain pornography or race hate material can injure your search engine rankings.
Website content is one of the most important parts of any SEO campaign. The content on your website is what you say about yourself and the products that you are looking to provide to visitors to the website. Content must be friendly to both search engines and to web users for it to perform at its best.
Targeting your website to the correct keywords should be the first stage of any campaign. If you target your website to the correct words the Return on Investment will be higher as prospective customers will be looking for the products you sell in the method appropriate to your website. Currently the website appears to be lacking in keyword focus. We shall explore this issue below.
The title of your webpage is the single most important piece of ‘on page’ information. Your title tag will define to users, and search engines, what the page will talk about. It will provide the link within the search engines to pages. As such it must relate to the appropriate keywords and also help to inform consumers of what the page contains.
The Meta information is data within the code of a webpage that is not displayed to a user. It is used to convey information to search engines. Meta data consists of two main types of data: description information and keyword information. The description is often placed below the link to a webpage and is used to help consumers understand the core focus of the webpage within the results. The keywords tag contains a list of terms that the page is targeted towards and is used by some search engines as a way of determining the focus of the webpage.
Body content is highly important for your website. It is the content that sells your product/service to prospective customer and at the same time affects your search engine positions. For content to be search engine targeted it is important to include the following:
Pages targeted for keywords talk about those keywords within the copy. The level of your keywords within your content is known as the ‘keyword density’. It is important to have a keyword density that is higher than average for a page of copy but is not so high as to make the web content unintelligible or unreadable.
To achieve the best rankings not only should the keywords appear throughout the document but in key sections, such as the first paragraph, the keywords should appear in proximity to each other.
Within documents search engines seek to determine the relevance of a document. One way this is done is by analysing the use of related keywords with a document. The related keywords are known as semantic keywords. Using semantic content allows us to improve the user experience, as content can be written more naturally, and search engine experience, as it heighten relevance.
As search engines read the code of your web pages it is important to present the website content in the way that will deliver the maximum relevancy. Content performance can be improved by adapting the code to direct the search engines to the sections of code that are most important.
Header tags are the most important content tags. Header tags determine the focus of the content to follow the tag. The most important of the header tags is the H1 header tag. This tag defines the core focus of all the content within the document.
If content is not optimally coded the performance of web pages can be reduced within the search engine results. Inappropriate use of content tags can lead to search engines misunderstanding our intention with the webpage content.
Links are the way that we all navigate the web. We click on results in search engines, links in website navigation and links everywhere in the goal of finding the information that will satiate our particular desire. For this reason search engines see links as what binds the web together. The connections between websites are hugely important within the ranking algorithms of the major search engines.
Link Attributes
Search Engines analyse links for the following attributes:
- What does the link say?
- Who is saying it?
- What does the page containing the link say overall?
- What do other say about the page saying it?
What Does The Link Say?
The keywords you have used within the copy of the website and the keyword focus of the page, should be reinforced in the text of the link. Sites that have content and synchronous links will rank more highly than other documents that are less synchronous.
Who Is Saying It?
All links are not made equal and some links will deliver more strength to your website than other links.
Page Rank
PageRank is the variable used by Google to highlight the ‘importance’ of your web page. Higher PageRank pages will rank higher than other pages (assuming all other factors in the analysis are equal). PageRank is generated by the quantity of links you have pointing to your page and the PageRank of these links.
Trust Rank
Some sites have such a wealth of important information that they develop trust. Highly trusted sites will deliver stronger links than PageRank alone. Sites with string PageRank and TrustRank will rank more effectively than pages with only Trust or Importance alone.
Co-citation
Links can be more important if they are also from pages that contain links to our competitors. This means that the page can be of most use for our linking efforts if competitors are already on the page. Links from these pages will bring us closer to the central hub of link authority for our important key phrases.
What Do The Links Say?
Having links pointing to your website that use the words most appropriate to your search terms can help dramatically to improve the positioning of your website within the natural search engine indices.
What Does The Page Containing The Link Say Overall?
Having a link saying the right thing from an important and trusted page will only get you so far. We also require the page to be talking about something similar to the core focus of the page at which the link points. What do others say about the page saying it?
Thanks Colin – a good wee snapshot concerning site audits, and as someone froma web development background intending to go freelance in SEO (still on the learning curve!), it’s a good mental checklist.