Internet marketing is a fairly new industry and with that you will find most people working within it are fairly young. As many of us are now into our 30’s the idea of a regular medical exam starts to become a good idea. We want to make sure that everything is ticking the way it should and if we do find any problems, we’re on top of it early to prevent further damage down the road.
Regular exams are key for a long healthy life and this also rings true when it comes to the health of your website. It’s important to regularly go over your site with a fine tooth comb and make sure that it’s functioning properly. Too often we put off regular checkups and only really start to look deep into issues when things go terribly wrong. If you decide to wait, you may be looking at something that takes a lot of time and resources to fix instead of something that could have been quickly resolved.
The ‘Set it and forget it’ technique is something that just isn’t going to work for SEO, and this is especially true for large sites. Most people will do small periodic checks from time to time, but I would suggest taking the time to do a full on top-to-bottom audit of your site. In most cases it’s a real eye opener with how many areas need to be improved.
So where do you start?
When you do your website audit, the list of items you check should be extensive. While the list below doesn’t contain everything, it does give you a few main things you will want to take a close look at.
- Title Tags
- Broken Links
- Site Architecture
- Orphaned Pages
- Duplicate Content
- Redirects
- Description Tags
- Alt Tags
- Robots.txt
- External Links
- Canonicalization
- XML Sitemap
- Link Profile
- Domain Expiration
A few tools to help:
Review your content.
This is also a good opportunity to review the content on your site. Are there pages which are no longer relevant and need to be revised? Is there a need to build out your content so you can improve visitor experience and increase long tailed rankings?
