Assessing Your SEO Checklist

When assessing your website from a standpoint of the appropriate SEO and indexing, you need to consider several things. These are not mandatory, but think seriously about them before attempting how you want to rank in the search engines. While keywords are good for search-ability and getting the right audience to your website, valuable content is also a part of the successful formula. Let’s discuss the most important things to think about.

Traffic

Everyone’s goal is to drive traffic to their website, correct? Yes, indeed! However, you don’t just want anyone visiting your website. You want targeted traffic, which means people who will likely buy from you. Traffic is not necessarily a search engine ranking issue. If your website ranking drops, it is not indicative of fewer people visiting your website. The problem could be that the search engines are not crawling your website as they should. On the other hand, your website could be crawled, but not being indexed. It could be an issue with extraction. You need to have a contingency plan in place to diagnose this issue. Start by developing a system that reports back to you. The first thing you want to know is where you rank for some of your top keywords and where you are in the SERPs. This will give you a general idea on where you rank in the search engines for certain queries.

Your Web Pages

Your web pages should be organized by categories. This means that it is in your best interest to assess the logs on your server for activities from the search engine bot. This should be done for each category. This gives you a better idea as to the extent and success at which the bots are spidering and indexing your web content. In some cases, you may find some categories getting more ‘crawl’ attention than others. The crawl rates may also vary in each category page. For example, while some pages may have a crawl rate of 100 pages each day, some may have only 10 pages each day. You should be able to view how many pages are picked up by the search engine crawlers from each category page. You should be able to tell how long the bot takes to crawl through your entire website.

Efficiency

The search engines are not going to contribute a lot of crawl time on all of your content. The efficiency of the crawl is important. If you have many web pages to be crawled, you should have your pages organized in such a way that the crawler will know which pages are most essential to crawl.  For example, let’s say you have a subscription page and error page, you don’t want to have those crawled by the search engine bot. These pages are unproductive. You want the crawler to spend more time on productive pages such as your content, about us, services and order page.

Site Maps

For each category, create xml site maps. However, be sure that these are canonical. This means that you should create site map index files that are linked to the other site maps that you have. Make sure they are submitted to Google Webmaster Central.  This will provide an accurate evaluation of the efficiency of the Google crawler on different sections of your website. Even better, you will be able to access resources and tools such as small graphs in the site map report of the Webmaster Central portal. This allows you to properly identify how much of your content has been indexed and the areas that have been crawled. For instance, if you happen to notice Google crawling only one category and only indexing portions of it, you then have a reason to look into why this is happening.

Troubleshooting

You should ensure that there is a problem with your SEO before running a report to fix the issue. So that means if you find that your pages are not being indexed as how they should, this doesn't mean that you have a major problem. Google may probably have de-indexed some of the pages on your website that are duplicated or just ineffective. Therefore, if the traffic coming from the search engine hasn't dropped, there is no significant problem.

Conclusion

There are the five solid tips on assessing your checklist from an SEO perspective. Understanding this is important to optimizing your website and making it search engine friendly.