Website Auditing with Technical SEO Tools
Before you undergo optimizing your website or even redesigning it you will want to first conduct a website audit. It will give you an overview of what is needed to be improved so you can achieve the SEO goals you are striving for.
Improving your Website Audits with Technical SEO
Each audit of your website is designed for the purpose of improving your overall page rankings. Some involve the basic function of a page while others focus on the relevant content and images of the page.
Website Optimization
Understanding and correcting the items below will improve your user experience and the overall conversions that occur on your website.
Errors
Errors to correct include items such as broken links and errors on the server (No responses, 4XX client and 5XX server errors).
Redirects
Web Page actions that change the direction of the page itself such as permanent, temporary, JavaScript redirects & meta refreshes.
Blocked URLs
Protocols for robot.txt files that disallow the URL.
Blocked Resources
When you are in rendering mode the resources are blocked.
External Links
The status and source code external links.
Security
View unsecured pages, content that is mixed and missing security headers, etc.
URL Issues
Issues that arise from non-ASCII characters, URL names with underscores and characters that are uppercase, parameters including long URLs.
Duplicate Pages
View pages on your website that are near matches or exact replicas of other webpages.
Page Titles
Titles that have issues such as duplicate keywords or keyphrases, very long or short elements.
Meta Description
Missing, duplicate, long, short or multiple descriptions.
Meta Keywords
Keywords are not used anymore by the primary search engines anymore but are mainly used as references for smaller search engines.
File Size
The overall size of website files such as images or source code.
Response Time
The length of time it takes for a web page to render and respond to a request.
Last-Modified Header
The HTTP header last modified date.
Crawl Depth
The length or how deep the pages of a website's reaches. The architecture of a website or its ability for each page to connect to each other such as from root to a folder to a folder, etc.
Word Count
Counting the exact number of words that occur on each webpage.
H1
Discover any duplicate, unnecessary long or short tags or multiple keywords or phrases for the primary heading of the page.
H2
Discover any duplicate, unnecessary long or short tags or multiple keywords or phrases for the secondary heading of the page.
Meta Robots
View any tags that are designed to dictate what is permitted or allowed on each page such as noindex, nofollow, noarchive, etc.
Meta Refresh
The ability to delay a page loading by a time setting.
Canonicals
A URL that is inserted into the code that decides what the page will reference for link elements and canonical HTTP headers.
X-Robots-Tag
View any directives that has issues from the HTTP Header.
Pagination
The ability to navigate by the rel="next" and rel="prev" attributes.
Follow & Nofollow
Discover meta tags that use the follow and nofollow link attributes.
Redirect Chains
View the chains and loops redirect attribute.
hreflang Attributes
View language codes and canonical hreflang that are incorrect or even missing.
Inlinks
Discover every link that is connecting to a URL such as an anchor text including whether it is follow or nofollow links.
Outlinks
Discover every link that is linking out to other URLs.
Anchor Text
This includes every link text and images with ALT tags that connect via URL.
Rendering
Any executed Javascript that is created after an HTML page is rendered such as AngularJS or any Javascript framework.
AJAX
Executing a script via AJAX to render a page or element.
Images
Issues with images that have broken images, missing or too many characters in an ALT text.
User-Agent Switcher
Website crawls that come as bots such as Googlebot, Bingbot, mobile user-agents, etc.
Custom HTTP Headers
A request for a value in the header for any cookie to Accept-Language.
Custom Source Code Search
Discover issues and elements that you can view in a webpage source code.
Custom Extraction
Scraping data within the HTML or CSS Path selectors, regex, etc.
Google Analytics Integration
Integrating the Google Analytics API to discover users and conversions when a crawl occurs.
Google Search Console Integration
Adding Google API for Analytics and URL Inspection to collect bulk data on performance, etc.
PageSpeed Insights Integration
Adding metrics for Lighthouse to improve speed and data for Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX).
External Link Metrics
Connecting via API to external software to pull in data for website audits from Ahrefs and Moz APIs, etc.
XML Sitemap Generation
Generating an XML or image sitemap to use for search engines that spider your website.
Custom robots.txt
Creating a new robot.txt file for testing and editing.
Rendered Screen Shots
Discover, analyze and view webpages that are crawled.
Store & View HTML & Rendered HTML
Analyzing the DOM.
AMP Crawling & Validation
When you crawl and validate AMP URLs.
XML Sitemap Analysis
The ability to crawl partially to discover issues with items such as non-indexable or missing webpages.
Visualisations
The ability to analyze the structure and linking of a website using crawl and tree graphs.
Structured Data & Validation
Validate and pull structured data for Schema.org and features from Google.
Spelling & Grammar
Validate that you do not have misspelled words and grammar mistakes including other languages.
Crawl Comparison
View crawl data and then compare them to see if there are any issues or advantages you have to improve your SEO including site structure, etc.
