Site owners beware: You cannot do an in-depth audit of your website in a couple of hours. It could take a few days depending how big your website is. As such you need to plan for it and follow a step by step sequence to cover all your bases.
You should start by choosing a good crawling tool like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider or BeamUsUp. If search engines and users cannot get into your website you are wasting your time and resources. You can use your robots.txt file to let them know which pages to crawl.
404 errors don’t cause any harm that’s impossible to repair, but they can make your website look careless and unsystematic.
Also watch your XML Sitemap closely. Search engine crawlers uses this to find all of the pages of your website. Make sure it is working well and that there are no errors reported in your Google Search Console.
The above is but a starting point in your website audit process. The below linked to article goes into the matter in greater detail. And for a full step by step guide look out for the ebook we’ll be publishing in the coming months on this very topic.
Key Takeaways:
- In order to determine a problem to a website, one must look at the website in whole, instead of chunks.
- If google, bing, etc. cannot find your page, then no matter how pretty you make your page, it will not matter.
- Search engines are constantly changing and therefore people should continue to look for ways to improve their websites to make it more reachable for all, and to keep up to current trends.
“At a foundational level, creating stellar, authentic content needs to be your top priority.”
Read more: http://searchengineland.com/4-mistakes-avoid-website-audit-272808
