short url: http://beeseen.com/s/j
Conducting An SEO Audit To Troubleshoot Problems & Tune-Up Performance – SMX Advanced 2009
Speakers:
Vanessa Fox
Adam Audette
Derrick Wheeler
Has something gone wrong with your organic search engine traffic? An SEO audit might be in order. This session covers how to conduct an efficient audit that troubleshoots real problems, rather than taking you down blind alleys. It also helps you reassess your current SEO efforts for areas that can be tweaked and improved.
Speaker: Derrick Wheeler
CIRTA:
- Crawl
- Index
- Rank
- Traffic
- Action
Six Steps to Sucess:
Organic Search Engine Optimization is the process of systematically satisfying the needs of search engines and the needs of your users.
The 6 steps to success in organic search engine optimization are:
- search engine crawls entire site
- search engine indexes entire site
- users perform targeted queries
- search engine ranks appropriate pages
- users click on ranked listings
- users take action and/or interact with the site
Search Engine Ranking
SE Rankings should be tracked on a monthly basis. Some important factors to track are:
- Top keyword list
- Long tail keyword list
- User paths
- Success events
- Value of user
Speaker: Adam Audette
Outrider (’97), AudetteMedia, Oversee SEO at Zappos, Lead SEO strategy at AKQA
Site Audits
Site audits are very intensive experiences. They rely on the experience of the auditor and require a crucial amount of problem solving. It’s easy to learn, but takes a lot of time to master. It’s essentially, part art and part science.
Part Art:
- Follow your nose
- Use your experience
- Requires diligence
- Requires trust
Part Science:
- Use tools to diagnose
- Undergo calculatory investigation
- Check for set factors
- Document everything
Factors Investigated:
- Main navigation elements
- General navigation items
- URL
A Framework for SEO audits:
On-page:
- Domains
- Sections and categories
- Pages
- Media (Images, video, etc.)
Off-Page:
- Back-links (quantity, quality)
- Social media signals
- Cache date(s), indexed pages
- Toolbar PageRank
Big 4 Factors:
- URLs
- Site Architecture & Navigation
- Product-level Pages
- Site Latency
What about Deliverables:
- Summarize
- Keep it Prioritized
- Keep it Actionable
- Build in Follow-up
- Sizzle Matters (presentation matters, professional, visuals)
Executive Summary
Priority level = High Medium Low
Documenting Issues:
- Problem
- Impact
- Recommended Solutions
Some Cool Tools:
- Google Searches
site: + inurl: / intitle: - Lynx / SEO-browser.com
- Charles / ySlow (checks latency)
- Various Toolbars
SEO Book Toolbar – compare up to 5 URLs together - Google WAVE
Other Tools:
- Linkscape
- SEMRush
- wget
- Log Analysis
Speaker: Vanessa Fox
Tools and Tactics for Diagnostics
Step 1: Get the data
Benchmark the top 10 search queries that bring in the most traffic
Aaron wall’s rank checker
Crawl Log Example:
Apache Log Analyzer 2 Feed
code.simonecarletti.com/wiki/apachelog2feed
For SEO
Some important things to consider:
- Site latency is an indexing factor. If the site is not crawled then it’s a ranking factor.
- AJAX is not adequate at this point for SEO. The URL needs to change (don’t keep the same URL for all content/pages)
- Make a URL structure Checklist
- Keep track of and make a crawl efficiency checklist
- Set “nofollow” for registration pages, add to cart shopping cart pages, etc.
If there are any problems:
- Check if you are penalized
webmaster.live.com
google.com/webmasters - Review the webmaster guidelines
- Identify the issue
- Fix it!
- Request re-evaluations