Auditing Your Website
Over the last few months I’ve worked with a fairly diverse spread of verticals and quickly realized how little many people know about their own websites. Most instances I have worked from the onset of the project doing work like reviewing the initial keyword research and looking at internal linking structure. Typically when we ask a customer if they even know what the are targeting as far as key words and phrases, they spit out the name of their biggest seller, which is a good guess but not usually what can be seen when analyzing their website.
Often times when requesting AwStats or Google Analytics access the customer is not only mystified, but almost offended that there is an application that can track the traffic and sales on their site. I have a tendency to believe that this behavior stems from a lack of understanding of what is going on behind ones monitor and router. People need to remember that there are sophisticated systems in place that define their web presence and overall success online.
From this point on, we will look at the basic tactics involved in a self audit.
SEO Auditor
The first thing you should do is get somewhat comfortable identifying different parts of the source code of your webpages. Pop over to W3Schools and get comfortable with html. The next thing to do is start checking out your pages both from a human perspective, and from a “robot” perspective using ctrl+u to view the source code of a page. Check your pages out and see what you are using as meta keywords and descriptions. Analyze your internal links and see if you are making use of a simple and easy to follow link structure. Simple and easy navigation from page to page is key. Try and avoid excessive characters and numbers, and maintain the usage of either www.insertnamehere.com or http://insertnamehere throughout the site.
When you are comfortable looking at your site from the perspective of a search engine, set up a Google Analytics account and start tracking your page views and conversions so you can set a baseline. Up to this point you shouldn’t have changed anything yet, just looked at what is there. Record your traffic for a month to establish a baseline. Once you’ve collected some data you will be better suited to start improvements.
Additional auditing can include tasks as simple as viewing each page on your site in three different browsers and verifying that the links work and the colors are not detestable. Trust me, occasionally you will really regret font and color choices after hours of viewing.
Remember, your website is an extension of your brick and mortar. You wouldn’t want your shop to have peeling paint and overflowing bathrooms with no one manning the front desk. The same goes for your website, keep tabs on it. When sales are slow its imperative that you act rather than waiting around for someone to come and buy your product.
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