SEO TECH AUDIT: 4 MUST DO’S
So you’re looking to begin an SEO campaign; or perhaps you’re looking to completely review your current campaign. A good place to start is with a full tech audit. A tech audit will require you to become the Sherlock Holmes of the SEO world. You’ll have to investigate each technical requirement for successful SEO, and then see if you’re doing it properly or not. Try to picture a search engine algorithm as a giant check list; your job is to work through the check list and make sure every box is ticked. Check out some important technical points below that are advisable to check within your audit. 1) XML Sitemap What the heck does XML stand for? Does anyone even know? Yes. We do. Extensible Markup Language. You’re welcome. Anyway, so often the XML sitemap is completely ignored, or not even created. Without it, how are you going to tell search engine crawlers which pages to hit first? How’re you going to tell them which pages are your most important? Create your XML sitemap, include your priorities and don’t include a last modified attribute. Oh, and do not neglect it. 2) Static URLs There are two types of URL for your website: Static and Dynamic. Where possible, always create static URLs. Occasionally this cannot be done, for example, within recruitment, you may have a lot of jobs uploaded and then when filled they’re taken down. Creating a static URL each time isn’t always possible. So you create dynamic. The problem with dynamic URLs is that they cannot be read by search engine crawlers. So, always try to create keyword optimised static URLs. This will tick one of the checklist boxes we spoke about earlier. 3) Site speed This is 2015 (if you didn’t already know). We’re mostly an impatient bunch. Nobody has time to wait 6 seconds for a web page to load. Search engines know this. If you have a slow page speed, be prepared to lose some ranking potential. ‘Nuff said. 4) Mobile friendliness Oooooo mobile friends (picture that saying in context with the hilarious lads from The Inbetweeners). The 21stApril 2015 was a huge day in the digital world. That was the day Google changed their algorithm to the favour of mobile-friendly websites. Having a mobile-friendly website doesn’t mean that your website works on a mobile device. It means your website responds to mobile devices so it’s more user friendly to the visitor. Think about it, how often do you use your mobile to search things? The answer is probably very often. So does everybody else. Don’t have a mobile-friendly site? Bye bye decent rankings. Do have a mobile-friendly site? Congratulations, you’re back in the running for the #1 spot. Thanks for reading our ‘SEO Tech Audit: 4 Must Do’s’ article – this post covers just a small number of factors involved for successful SEO. Be sure to visit our website digital marketing blog for all the latest happenings in digital marketing. We’re Digital Clicks, working with SEO in Cambridge and across the whole country. For more information, any help or advice for your campaign or to know more on how we work, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of our SEO specialists. Error: Contact form not found.