Website Audit - Analyze Your Site for SEO Mistakes and Dead Links

Even the most accurate webmasters find outright SEO gaffes and inaccuracies on their websites over time. It's very difficult to ensure a website's integrity and perfectly optimized condition, especially if the website is growing and frequently updated.

SEO analysis is typically conducted at early stages of website lives; however, newer content publications may change the SEO picture beyond recognition. To ensure that your website stays highly optimized for search engines, conducting regular SEO analyses is critical.

As time goes on, sites tend to accumulate technical errors such as dead links and broken named anchors; it is difficult to control links to every old page, image, script and and other file that must be present at the initially specified address. It is far more difficult to control files located on other peoples' sites that you may be linking to - you would hardly know if they are still reachable six months down the line and you don't want to link to nonexistent URLs. What you need is a good broken link checker that will conduct regular website audits and alert you to found errors.

After you've received an SEO checklist, conducted keyword research and decided on keywords and phrases that you will use to communicate benefits of your product or service to your prospects, you will have to implement the search engine optimization recommendations that a keyword specific site audit will have made.

The Web CEO Website Auditor is a tool that combines SEO analysis and broken link checking; it is one of the most popular SEO tools.

What you can find in the SEO Analysis Report

The SEO Analysis report ("Summary") represents an SEO review of all important pages that you have selected and your website broken link review.

You can find General Optimization advice pinpointing many frequent problems such as missing or duplicate titles, search engine unfriendly URL structure, search engine unfriendly redirection methods used, a missing Sitemap or robots.txt file and many other nasty things that may prevent your site pages from getting high search engine rankings.

The SEO Analysis tool ("Summary" and "SEO issues") allows you to select important pages of your site and check if these pages are optimized for key phrases. On-the-page Optimization analysis will tell if your keywords are used in the page areas that search engines consider important for high rankings.

As it is technically impossible to have a page optimized for many keywords at once, it is recommended that you use up to three key phrases per page each including two or three words. For example, if the main phrase is "Hawaii vacation homes", the two supporting phrases might be "Hawaii vacation rentals" and "Hawaii beach homes".

To visit and review each page URL where an SEO error has been found, you should use the "SEO issues" report.

Why is It Important to Check Your Site for Broken Links?

The importance of a website audit cannot be underestimated if you run a web-based business. Broken links can seriously damage your "credibility" - visitors are less likely to trust websites if they find them slow and full of broken links. Furthermore, interrupted sales funnels may cost you a lot of abandoned orders.

A website audit is a process of detecting and reporting usability and credibility problems on a website. It involves using a website auditor that will analyze the site for several factors, such as:

• Broken internal and external page links (unreachable or non-existent pages)
• Broken named anchors (improper named anchor syntax)
• Broken image links (unreachable or non-existent images) that may seriously affect your website's visibility on search engines and, consequently, your website's search engine rankings.

As a result, such a website audit can help give you:

• A clean and professional look for your website to attract and keep visitors interested and
• Information on the bottlenecks in the conversion funnels which will help you troubleshoot technical and marketing mistakes.