October 2009
Beginner
602 pages
19h 50m
English
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Auditing an Existing Site to Identify SEO Problems
Auditing an existing site is one of the most important tasks that SEO professionals encounter. SEO is a relatively new field, and many of the limitations of search engine crawlers are non-intuitive. In addition, web developers are generally not well versed in SEO. This includes those who have developed CMSs, so there is a lot of opportunity to find problems when conducting a site audit.
Elements of an Audit
As we will discuss in Chapter 6, your website needs to be a strong foundation for the rest of your SEO efforts to succeed. An SEO site audit is often the first step in executing an SEO strategy.
The following sections identify what you should look for when performing a site audit.
Usability
Although this may not be seen as a direct SEO issue, it is a very good place to start. Usability affects many factors, including conversion rate, as well as the propensity of people to link to a site.
Accessibility/spiderability
Make sure the site is friendly to search engine spiders. We discuss this in detail in Making Your Site Accessible to Search Engines and Creating an Optimal Information Architecture in Chapter 6.
Search engine health check
Here are some quick health checks:
Perform a site:yourdomain.com search in the search engines to make sure all your pages appear to be in the index. Compare this to the number of unique pages you believe you have on your site.
Test a search on your brand terms to make sure you are ranking for them (if not, you ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.