The First 7 Items On Your SEO Audit To-Do List You've just been given one day to do an SEO audit for a site, and you're asking yourself what to do with so little time. Instead of following your instinct to yell at the person who made the request, today's column will outline a practical approach to doing the best job possible in one day. The focus of this rapid audit is to identify issues at a strategic level - either because they are big impact items or may require large development team efforts to address. The major elements are: 1. If Google Webmaster Tools isn't currently set up, then get it put in place. Are there are any messages for the site in the opening screen? 2. Think there is no value in looking at a second Webmaster Tools? Google does a nice job with their tools, but allows you to get the viewpoint from a second search engine, and you will see different things. 3. See how many pages Google has in the index for the site. 4. There are a number of crawling tools you can use to help you with this. 5. 6. 7. Summary
40+ SEO Tools of the Trade The ongoing SEO responsibility of attaining and retaining a productive organic search engine presence requires patience, tenacity, and a focus on every detail that might have an impact. Moderated by Thom Craver (@thomcraver), Web and Database Specialist, Saunders College (RIT), The Tools of the Trade for SEO panel at SES New York 2012 pulled together more than 40 tools in this whirlwind session. Your Comprehensive List of SEO Tools Michael King (@iPullRank), SEO Manager, Publicis Modem, came up first with his presentation, “Tools for Pulling Rank – Nearly Every Tool You’ll Ever Need – EVER”. Here is a short list of most (certainly not all) of those tools covered: Some of the tools above were proprietary or built upon functionality inherent to the understanding and administration of available resources. Fortunately for conference attendees and Search Engine Watch readers (and writers), King was kind enough to provide his presentation on Slideshare. What About SEO Tools in Asia? T.R.
E-Commerce SEO: Making Product Pages into Great Content - Whiteboard Friday In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin explains how to turn boring product pages into conversion-worthy product selling machines. These tips are topical (with the holiday season coming up), useful and in most cases, reletively easy to implement. Howdy, SEOmoz fans. If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. SEO with long tail keywords How can a small site with few resources benefit from targeting long tail keywords? And won't such strategies and subsequent tactics get in the way of response? These questions were raised in comments following our investigation into the long tail of keyword research (and why single keywords are for losers) and I thought I’d use the comments to introduce some practical advice on how to target long tail keywords. The long tail works for small sites too Some readers’ comments: "Great insights but it requires lots of work. "Targeting hundreds of thousands of keywords means gaining the knowledge, creating a strategy and developing a system by which to manage them... "How many keywords does a person use when they search for a dentist in their home town? "...I've seen many businesses chase their tail and they look just like my dog." So I thought I’d pretend I’m a dentist in Chicago and have a go at planning a new site for my practice... My first goal is to draft the structure for my new website.
The Ultimate SEO Audit | The Daily Anchor An SEO Audit is a status check of the overall health of your SEO program. In order to move the dial in natural search, you need to know what you’re doing right, what needs to be improved and identify anything that may be hurting your rankings. If you’re familiar with SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) that’s the mindframe you should have as you conduct the SEO Audit. What follows is a look at some of the criteria you’ll want to take into consideration. Ok… on with it… Before you start, sign up for a Webmaster Account with each of the major Search Engines, or just Google if you’re the “80/20 rule” kind of SEO. Google Webmaster Tools (free) Bing Webmaster Tools (free) Sign up and authenticate your site. Yahoo Site Explorer (free) Same deal; sign up and authenticate your site. While you’re at it, sign up for an SEOmoz PRO account and create a new campaign. Image credit: CubicCompass 1. b) Check your CSS using the W3C CSS Validator. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
How To Do An SEO Audit The first step in any new SEO relationship is to conduct an audit. Imagine the poor client who has changed SEO providers several times. If the providers were all on their toes, they each conducted audits. Some businesses may dread the SEO audit process because, if done properly, it will be thorough and exhaustive. In fact, whether a company changes SEO providers or not, it’s a good idea to conduct a thorough SEO audit at least once a year, especially if the business is drawing significant revenue from search traffic. The SEO audit should produce a snapshot of the state of health of a Website (and the publisher’s SEO practices) at the time of the audit. Why defer making changes until after an SEO audit? What follows are some high-level suggestions for how to do an SEO audit. There is no right or wrong answer for that question, but if I were in the position of not knowing how to examine something I would recommend to the client that they bring in someone to check that part of the system.
A Step by Step 15 Minute SEO Audit (A Sample from SEO Secrets) The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. About seven months ago, I was asked by Wiley Publishing if I wanted to write a book about advanced SEO. Assuming they had accidentally contacted the wrong person, (You know Rand is spelled with an 'R' right?) I eventually accepted and found out they had indeed wanted me. Shortly after, I wrote a blog post asking what all of you would like to read. I got a lot of great feedback and heard loud and clear that people wanted clearly defined processes with detailed explanations of the reasoning behind every action. The following is one section of one chapter of my book. Chapter 4: Finding SEO Problems Sections: 15 Minute SEO Audit 10 Minute Brand Reputation Audit (Not included in this blog post) Identifying Search Engine Penalties (Not included in this blog post) 15 Minute SEO Audit The basics of SEO problem identification can be done in about 15 minutes. Homepage