How to Conduct a Brief Site Audit
The cost of promoting any website is based on two factors. The first is direct competition in the TOP-10 for a particular request. The second factor takes into account all the components of the site itself, which is being prepared for promotion.
It is quite difficult to correctly assess competition in the top ten search engine results. Often only with experience comes the vision of all the pitfalls that await on the way to the TOP . Especially great difficulty is the correct interpretation of the readings taken from the " sickle " at the request we need.
But to evaluate the site or, as they say, to audit the site , you can pretty quickly and now we'll talk about this particular procedure. However, do not think that this part of the preparation for promotion is of lesser importance. Some site indicators can significantly affect the final figure of the promotion budget .
Site audit can also be divided into two stages. First, you need to conduct a brief audit of the site using elementary plugins compatible with the FireFox browser or online services that help collect all external information about the site. Secondly, the internal optimization of the resource is evaluated in terms of design, content and some other factors, but we will talk about this in the next article.
For now, we simply present a list of parameters and properties that need to be checked during a brief audit of the site and the collection of external information :
- The site should open only with www or without www. Otherwise, you need to set up a 301 redirect .
- Having a well-formed robots.txt
- Availability of an up-to-date sitemap in xml format.
- Domain age.
- The content management system ( CMS ) that is used on this resource is determined.
- Validation of html -code is checked.
- Estimating site loading speed.
- If possible, it is worth determining the uptime of the server.
- Site indexing in search engines. It is important that the number of indexed pages in Yandex and Google be approximately the same.
- The presence of the site in directories such as DMOZ and Yandex.Catalog .
- TIC and PR (where without them!).
- The number of incoming and outgoing links.
- Evaluation of traffic to the site based on the data of the Liveinternet counter. A good sign is not just high traffic, but the ratio of pages viewed per unique visitor. The bigger it is, the better.
- In the case when the site does not use traffic counters, you can roughly estimate the traffic using the Alexa service.