Any SEO must possess a range of SEO tools enabling it to quickly and effectively audit referencing a website. The first SEO tool, it is certainly to have a checklist of simple but comprehensive offering a first glimpse of the state of referencing a web site.
Note that this is a first technical audit of website small or medium size, mainly analyzing the factors blockers. The study of strategic keywords and audience, writing web pages and semantics, exploiting the long tail, profile and network of internal or external links and their anchors, the positioning and competition, are subject to extensive audits and complementary. These audits, often described as a marketing audit, strategic, netlinking, semantic or editorial, of course, are key to a complete SEO audit.
But first, before embarking on further studies, it is useful to review the site and identify any factors that may affect the proper referencing and positioning of said site.
Technical audit checklist:
First impressions as a user
- Intuitive navigation
- Rapid discovery of info sought
- Easy Action eg filling out forms or order an item
accessibility for users and robots
- Navigate the site by banning JavaScript, cookies, css layout
- Degradation JS / Ajax
- Check the robots.txt file (errors or prohibitions important urls)
- Testing errors and exploration as a robot (http response, urls not found, dead links, restricted access, etc.)
- Browse the site under useragent / ip Google (detecting cloaking)
State Google indexing
- Number of pages indexed (application site: url field)
- Query on the domain name
- Google caches pages Cleese (eg hidden content)
- Presence website links, mini site links, clustering
- Webmaster Tools (identification errors,Sitemap)
- Flux (structure, stats)
Identity
- Domain Name (length, expiration, first indexing, whois)
- Server & Hosting (quality, reliability, IP)
Audit content
- Enough textual
- Warning if too many pictures, videos, links
- Entry pages without content, splash page, etc.
- Tags techniques header
Duplicate Content
- External Audit copies on the internet
- Check canonical URL (eg www vs.. Without www, index directories)
- Check domains and subdomains thereof (redirects, doorway pages)
Tags Title
- Single page
- Structure and order of keywords, site name or mark
Meta Tags
- Meta robots (eg if using noindex, nofollow)
- Description (single, eloquent and optimal length of the SERP snippet)
- Presence of other metas unnecessary (eg keyword with dozens of keywords), or even dangerous (eg refresh to 0, revisit after)
URLs
- Unique page url
- Clean urls, short and speaking (keywords wisely, and easy to remember)
- Warning frames, Flash, Ajax
- htaccess (url rewriting errors)
meshing of internal links and site structure
- Architecture & Navigation (number of clicks, links-type html, JS, Flash, etc., breadcrumbs)
- Number of links (home page and heads of sections)
- Anchor links
- Use Nofollow (errors)
- Paging (see also duplicate content)
- Orphan Pages
- Sitemap html
- Sitemap xml
- Page 404 (existence and structure)
HTML Code
- Clean code (no error) and light, eg W3C
- Page load time important
- Outsourcing CSS, JS scripts, flash
- AC Content (alt tags filled in, flash, noscript, aligned with visible content)
- Filenames
- Using preload, caching, css and image spriting
- Presence keywords semantic html (first screening)
Redirects
- Check http headers
- htaccess and url rewriting
Geolocalisation
- IP server hosting
- Domain name, country tld (eg. En)
- Webmaster Tools
- Indexing Google Local Business
- The appropriate detection and management of additional languages
External Links
first review at this stage + Identification pbs. potential
- Number, quality (presence of links to authority sites theme, ODP)
- Anchor links
- Natural profile
- Links pages deep (%)
- Purchased links and networks of links
- Possibly if PR recent update (home page and internal distribution, warning as many pages dimmed)
- Site links to sites audited spammy, many links footer, etc.
Analysis Tools
- Checking existence of analysis tools (eg Google Analytics)
Only identifying the most important abnormalities at this stage eg motor traffic, time, number of pages, new visitors abnormally low bounce rate unusually high
For those who need to audit several sites and love the structured approaches, you can assign an importance factor to each point, record the site of 1 to 10 of this criterion, and then use your favorite spreadsheet …