Do-it-yourself SEO audit

The photo shows the Cessna checklist: what are the positions to set the switches before starting the engine, permissible flight parameters, and so on. The pilot is not the first time to see this list. Learn - just spit. But the brain can overwrite information, creating false memories, but at the “request” data will be marked as “correct”. But printed on paper does not change, so it can be trusted to 100%. SEO is not about managing a plane with a hundred people on board. You can lose only a few tens of thousands of rubles (if, for example, you start promotion with pages closed from being indexed in robots.txt). But is not it easier to spend 5-10 minutes to check and make sure that everything is done correctly? ..

Modern search engine ranking algorithms take thousands of factors into account, but among them are the most important. SEO audit allows you to understand whether the site is ready for promotion, whether it meets these criteria. Not all developers understand that a resource can look and work normally, but at the same time have some critical flaws.
')
All the errors listed below are typical, we summarized them from the experience of thousands of audits of real projects. With site checks and recommendations for improvement, you can also find in our blog .

1. Errors in Title, Description, Keywords

• The headings (Title) of the pages must be unique - if they are the same, which often happens when CMS automatically generates them, search engines can glue some of them together, and gluing essentially excludes pages from the issue. Non-unique, automatically created Title may look like this: “domain is the first line of the page content / contents of the Keywords or Description meta tag.” From the point of view of website promotion, this is unacceptable: the contents of the Title tag should not be repeated literally on different pages. The search system may well be considered the same and glue the pages with the titles “Megautignadom.ru - Sale of irons at low prices | iron, iron, iron - Tefal FV5378 "and" Megautiunnadom.ru - Sale of irons at low prices | iron, iron, iron - Tefal FV5472 ".
• By the way, the same rule applies to the Keywords and Description meta tags.
• Titles should not be too long - 62 words are maximally taken into account, but since the weight of the main key is blurred at such a length, it is better to make them noticeably shorter.
• It is necessary to start a title with a key phrase that the page is moving on.
• Do not use quotes.
• The title should be readable, literate and clearly describe the content of the page. Yes, few people look at the window title, and the Description is not displayed by the browser at all, but the content of these tags in most cases forms snippets (brief descriptions of sites) in search results. And the attractiveness and clickability of the snippet is one of the most important parameters in the promotion and, in fact, the starting point of the conversion.

2. Non-unique content

We have already written about the importance of uniqueness, we will not repeat. However, this is one of the most common mistakes that prevent the conclusion in the TOP. Check out all pages using the Copyscape service .

3. Doubles

Many content management systems create duplicate pages open for indexing: print versions, with a closing slash and without, with www and without, search results and so on. Live visitors will not notice anything, but search robots will not like such a mess. Doubles need to glue to the main page using a 301 redirect, close from indexing in robots.txt, use the canonical tag. Detailed information on methods of finding and eliminating duplicates can be found here .

4. No updates

The site must be regularly updated - add new articles, news, products. At the same time, it is necessary to remain within the bounds of reasonable - if one day you post several thousand new pages, you can get under the filter "Many pages at once."

5. Spam

Everywhere, where there is an opportunity to leave a comment or message - be it a guest book, forums, reviews page - spammers will try to post their links and other garbage. They need to be protected from them (captcha, pre-moderation), and if they break through - delete. Site spam is an important negative signal for search engines. After clearing the pages of traces of intruders, do not be like them yourself: do not spam in the content and tags of Description and Keywords with repetitions of keywords, especially those not related to the subject of a particular page. If you put on the pages too many repetitions of a keyword in an attempt to gain high positions, the search engine will notice and reduce the position of the site upon issue. The ratio of the number of keywords to the total number of words on the page should be in the range of 5-7%.

6. Bad links

Use the webmaster tools of Yandex or Google, or a program like Xenu's Link Sleuth to find and eliminate links that lead to deleted or renamed pages.

7. The ratio of the total number of pages and the number of indexed pages

In the ideal case, the actual number of pages on the site should coincide with the number of pages in the search engine indexes (minus deliberately forbidden to indexation).

• webmaster.yandex.ru/check.xml
• In Google Webmaster Tools: Status - Indexing Status

If the site is large, the pages will go into the indexes gradually, but if the ratio is still far from 1: 1, you need to look for and eliminate the cause. Usually these are either extra bans in robots.txt, or duplicate content, or errors in the CMS settings. By the way, at this stage it is possible to check whether something that does not belong there is in the index.

8. Hotlinking

Links and video clips from major video hosting sites can be placed, but direct links to images from other sites are not recommended. It is better to copy the pictures on your server. This raises the question of borrowing graphic content: yes, it’s better to take your own photos and illustrations, but if the image is not protected by copyright (for example, if it’s photos of products from the manufacturer’s website), you can use it.

9. Russian-speaking and ugly URL

• URLs must match the domain: if it is written in Latin, they must also be written in Latin (in English or transliteration), if the domain is Cyrillic, page addresses must be Russian-speaking. Exceptions like "Wikipedia" for the time being let them remain exceptions.
• Need to get rid of URLs like /? = 35wt4t and so on.
• The page address must contain the keyword phrase by which it is promoted. Optimal translit, i.e. Record of Russian words in Latin.
• Splitting words into URLs should be hyphens, not underscores. Google treats “-” as a word separation mark, and “_” as a connection mark.

10. Curve Layout

• Tags must be private. If possible, you need to check how the pages look from the point of view of search robots (in the web tools there are services for this).
• No more than one H1 header per page (must contain a keyword phrase, you cannot use links inside the tag). It is necessary to maintain a logical structure of the other levels, use header tags only for content markup and nothing else.
• For images, you need to fill in Alt and Title with descriptions with keywords.
• HTML code is best maintained valid. This ensures trouble-free indexing and full display in all browsers. You can check the pages on the validator.w3.org website.

11. Slow loading pages

Errors in setting up a web server or CMS can cost you not only a good attitude of visitors, but also a place in the search results: both Yandex and Google do not like slow websites. Download speed information is available from Google Analytics .

12. Error page 404 is missing

You need to configure the site so that when you request a non-existent page, the response code 404 (page not found) or 410 (page removed) is returned. In order not to lose visitors, page 404 should be clear: contain links (primarily to the main page), explaining the text and the site logo.
To find out what page 404 looks like, you need to type the URL of a non-existing page on your domain in the address bar.

13. Robots.txt file

The file with instructions for search engines should allow them to index everything they need and prohibit everything unnecessary, and also contain the path to the site map and an indication of the site’s main mirror (with or without www).

14. Internal linking

With the help of links within the site, you can transfer weight (authority) from less important pages to more important pages - for example, to the main page. This helps to improve the position of recipient pages in the search results for keywords relevant to their content. Links should not become circular, that is, the recipient page should not link back to the donor page or the page that gives the weight to the donor.

15. Expires headers

This meta tag tells the search engine when a page is expected to refresh - so that it can correctly set the reindexing period (that is, when to knock again and index the changed content). In the code of the loaded page, it looks like this:. In the Expires header for the main page, you need to specify a period of no more than 5 days from the current date, for a section - no more than 2 weeks, for product pages / articles - no more than 30 days. The search robot is not strictly subject to these instructions, but it is not necessary to give it a reason to increase the period of reindexing. Header settings are configured either using the CMS or in the web server configuration.

16. Encoding indicated on the page and returned by the server

The most popular standards are UTF-8 and Windows-1251. If the site uses several encodings at once (the documents are in one, and the web server is different), in some browsers or search engines the text will appear as a set of obscure characters. Encoding of the site is indicated in a special meta tag in the page code:

16. Affiliate Filter

It is necessary to make sure that the contact details indicated on the site do not coincide with the data of other sites. Search engines may prevent the site from entering the search results if they find a certain combination of features: matching phone, e-mail, company name, similarity of domain names, company names, logos, similar design or site structure, copied or similar information on different sites, the same directory services or goods, one price list, combined data from different resources (for example, the address is from one site, and the phone is from another); Forwarding a phone call from different numbers to one company (can be detected during a manual check).

17. Contact information

Be sure to include on the site the actual address, phone number and other contact information. In addition to the usual mentioning of these data in the content, site header, etc., it is worth using the appropriate micromarking to transfer them to the search engines directly.

Conclusion
The principle of the Liebig-Timiryazev tub is also applicable to promotion: if a site lacks something, it will rise in issuance as far as this limiting factor will allow. Invest in links or content, if the site is full of duplicates = watering the cabbage with nitrogen fertilizers, if it lacks phosphorus. If you do not want to bother with checking yourself, order a detailed audit from our specialists .