We conduct SEO audit of the site - part two

So, we continue our fascinating route through the expanses of the site, perceiving it through the prism of the SEO worldview. Now SEO analysis will touch on content, structure, and some other aspects in detail.

Site architecture

We devoted a separate article to the structure of the resource and its friendship with search engine optimization. Important for SEO:

1. minimum nesting levels;
2. important landing pages are one click away from the main one, and the rest are 3-4 clicks away from it;
3. the minimum number of clicks to a lead;
4. "breadcrumbs" for online stores with a complex catalog.

A flat structure contributes to fast indexing, it is also convenient for users, who form one of the main criteria for evaluating a site by search engines - behavioral factors.

SEO audit also includes a detailed analysis of the resource's usability , based on the study of the click map and bounce rates. First of all, we study:

• home and landing pages;
• catalog logic;
• convenience of the ordering process;
• the quality of the site search;
• informative pages;
• effectiveness ofCTA elements.

One of the important points for further promotion is page linking. All the same indexing improves if the internal links of the site correctly "point" to each other. Linking helps distribute the importance of certain sections, but SEO has its own troubles in this regard:

• content, anchor and keywords of a certain page should be relevant;
• there should not be many links on one page;
• important landing pages must be linked from the main one;
• the more links to a particular page, the more significant it is for the search engine, and the higher it rises in the search results;
• link anchors are natural and diverse, in addition to keywords, options like “here”, “download”, “check out” should also be present.

Content

Let it be trite, but we cannot ignore the uniqueness of the texts. Yes, high-quality, interesting site content is what both visitors and SEO love :)

Other required landing page attributes:

• volume - at least 2000 characters;
• grammatically perfect content;
• moderately optimized text;
• key words in the first paragraphs.

Headlines are also a very interesting topic. They, like all content on the site, should be “for people”, but at the same time please search robots:

• volume of 70-90 characters;
• content of keywords (closer to the beginning);
• compliance with the topic of the article / news / informational text;
• uniqueness (Google Webmaster Tools will help you check for matching titles).

Do not forget about the description meta tag, its content is often included by search engines in the site snippet and can indirectly influence the user's decision to visit the resource. According to SEO canons, the so-called description is ideal if:

• consists of 150-160 characters;
• talks about a separate page, and not about the entire site;
• does not contain a large number of keywords;
• relevant, when the information on the page changes, the description also changes (for example, the price of a product);
• unique for each page of the site.

Duplicate content confuses search engines, they cannot determine which page should be indexed and shown in the search results. It is important to find duplicates on the archive website and instantly neutralize them using one of the following methods:

• setting up 301 redirects;
• using the directive rel="canonical";
• ban on crawling in the robots.txt file or in the meta of individual pages.

Images also cannot be on the site just like that, “with impunity”, they must comply with SEO requirements:

• the filename and value of the alt attribute of the <img> tag contain words describing the images and page keywords;
• there should be hyphens between words in the file name, not underscores;
• name and alt attribute are different;
• description - maximum 150 characters;
• only letters of the Latin alphabet and numbers can be used in the name of the graphic file;
• image size should not adversely affect the loading speed of the site.

Yes, dear readers, the topic of SEO audit is almost inexhaustible, but we promise that in the third part of the opus on the topic of site analysis, we will bring it to its logical conclusion. In addition, we left the most interesting, reference mass, for last!