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3

SMX Advanced – Day 2 – Conducting An SEO Audit

Posted by Brian Bowman, CMO, Reply.com
Filed Under Online Marketing, Tradeshows 

Conducting An SEO Audit To Troubleshoot Problems & Tune-Up Performance

Speakers

  • Adam Audette, Founder, Audette Media
  • Derrick Wheeler, Sr. SEO Architect, Microsoft
  • Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Lad

Metrics to track

  • Search engine activity
  • User activity
    • Useful to track with webmaster tools for tracking indexing to measure if you have a problem
    • Keep a short list of high-value keywords and mid-size list for tail terms and track monthly
    • Need to measure key business metrics to see how SEO is doing over time
  • Site audits are extremely intensive and are normally outsourced to get external feedback
  • Issues: Crawling, Indexing, Ranking

Framework for SEO audits

  • Domains/URLs/subdomains/filenames
  • Sections & categories – how they related to interior pages and navigation
  • Pages – product pages and interrelation
  • Media – are alt tags implemented, etc

Off-page

  • Backlinks (quantity, quality)
  • Social media signals twitter, digg, etc.
  • Cache dates, indexed pages
  • Toolbar PageRank
  • Marketleap has a tool for historical indexed pages

Big 4 factors

  • URLs
  • Site Architecture & Navigation
  • Product-level pages (tendency for duplicate content)
  • Site Latency

Key Deliverables

  • Summarize
  • Keep it Prioritized with High, Medium, Low
  • Keep it Actionable (Problem, Impact, Solution)
  • Build in Follow-up and Roadmap of What’s Next
  • Sizzle Matters – make the presentation pretty

Tools

  • IIS.net/extensions/seotoolkit Seo toolkit (no download needed) – just launched from Microsoft today (Site optimization, error identification)
  • Google site:domain.name – good for product pages
  • Lynxlet – looks at a site the way that a search engine does
  • SEO-browser.com – links on the web (same as above)
  • Charles – latency/debugging application (useful for landing page evaluation)
  • Firebug & whyslow give you recommendations on how to fix latency
  • Web developer toolbar shows you links on a page
  • Wave toolbar – structure of a page (can show outline and see how it is semantically structured)
  • SeoBook toolbar – comparison feature (green button) gives you main SEO metrics and can export to CSV
  • Linkscape – SEO backlink competitive research, good for 302s and 301
  • Wget-S good to see a very long redirect chain
  • Audettemedia.com/blog/seo-diagnostics-tool – parse log files (unix-based)
  • SEMRush – ranking of a site & good organic keyword report
  • Janeandrobot.com – lots of resources

Problems

  • Toolbar pagerank drops, number of indexed pages drops, indexing ratio change
  • Get the data
  • Top ten queries that bring in search traffic use – Rankchecker.com to get a report of pagerank
  • Crawl issue: run a script across log files to categorize how engines are crawling the site
  • Googlebot activity in last 90 days – need to evaluate data from Google
  • Crawl problems: flash, css images for links, ajax
Share and Enjoy:
  • Google
  • YahooMyWeb
  • TwitThis
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Technorati
  • LinkedIn
  • BlinkList
  • Furl
  • Live
  • NewsVine
  • Pownce
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • Mixx

Comments

One Response to “SMX Advanced – Day 2 – Conducting An SEO Audit”

  1. seo audit on July 13th, 2009 8:50 pm

    nice topics… i wish i could join.
    do you have videos of what was said?

    Regards,
    Hacene

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