Search Engine Optimization and Design Audit.

Let's face it, there's really nothing more important than ensuring your website is 'search engine friendly'. If you think having SEO performed on your website is 'too expensive', what is the cost of the alternative? Are you willing to pay big bucks for Pay-Per_click advertising indefinitely? You've invested in your website, are you willing to write-off that investment because you have little or no useful traffic?
Connect Online Services have been conducting SEO and Design Audits for over 10 years, helping countless businesses on the road to a successful web enterprise.

Below is an overview of some of the many steps we take each website through, as part of our Audit process. We actually utilize several audit documents along with software tools, spreadheets etc, ensuring no stone is left unturned as we pick through your website.

The purpose of any SEO Audit is to establish what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. With our Audit you will have the information necessary to take corrective actions, which you can implement yourself through your webmaster, or we can do it for you for a fee.

We can perform this audit for you for $499.00 which includes a full review of your website with detailed analysis of up to 10 of your key content pages.

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Here is an outline of some of the steps we use with your Audit. Feel free to print this document and conduct a self-assessment, at which point you can decide if you need our services or not -

Stage One - Tools

Start by signing up for a free Webmaster Account with Google. You can do the same thing with other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, but we'll just work with Google here for the sake of time.
Once inside your webmaster account, create an XML sitemap and follow the necessary steps to uploading it. There are programs online that you can purchase for around $20 that will create the sitemap for you and utilize Cron Jobs on your server to constantly update the sitemap based on the changing layout of your website. So if you create a new web page your sitemap is updated automatically. That's your choice, you can go free and update the XML file yourself, just remember to do it!

Inside of Google webmaster Tools you'll see a number of ways to check your website, use them all, get familiar with the processes and make them a part of your routine. For example, Google provides an internal link checker, duplicate content checker etc. Fix any and all problems that Google identifies with your pages before you move on.

Remember to do a Google search for “site:www.example.com” to see how many of your pages are actually indexed by Google. If you don't see the majority of your pages it could be that they have insufficient content, they have duplicate content or the navigation structure of your website is precluding them from the Google crawlers. Or, you might have a problem with your robots.txt file that is excluding sections of your website. If you see problems, you'll want to investigate them and try to get them fixed. Research the issues with Google FAQ's and don't be afraid to contact them if you can't find answers to your problems.

Stage Two - Design Considerations

If you are at the stage where you can still influence the structure of your website, consider how your pages are actually created. if you are using Joomla, ASP, PHP or other script based/CMS systems, you want to try to limit the use of session ID's in your URL's. The software you are using might have the option for 'search engine friendly' URL's, use that if you can.
Decide whether to use http://www.yoursite or http://yoursite and stick with it throughout. Mixing both dilutes your link effectiveness. This applies not only to internal site links, but when you start submitting your website to directories, the same thing applies, use www or don't, and stick with it.
Try to avoid extensive use of Flash, or avoid creating images and using text within the image. It's OK to do this here and there, but don't build your entire site around Flash, if you want it to be ranked well.
If you're confused here, it's often a good idea to try to see what the search engines see. Use YellowPipe Lynx Viewer to get a read on your site layout from the perspective of Google. If you have content in Flash or within images, you won't see that content when you run the check, meaning that Google won't see it either. You'll also notice that table structures affect the order in which your data appears to SE's. Did you really want the top navigation bar with its links to external content, to be read before your own internal page links?
On navigation, if you're using Javascript or Flash, you'll want to replicate the nav structure so that it can be followed by SE spiders, otherwise you'll be shutting off sections of your website. Better not to use Java/Flash if you can help it. Navigation at the top of the page is considered 'primary' so utilize it that way. Try to have no more than 3 or 4 levels of directories/files from the root.
Utilize keywords in page names and directory names, but do it sensibly.
Use 'breadcrumbs' even if you're using HTML designs. They give a path for spiders to follow into your content pages.
Try to avoid using HTML Frames, unless you really know how to optimize them.
For larger websites it's good practice to utilize a 'robots.txt' file. This gives instructions to search engine spiders on what to include and what not to include. For example, you might have a sub-directory full of pages that are all basically the same content. Or you might have a sub-directory of content that is off-theme. You can exclude these files/directories by utilizing the robots.txt file. Be careful with it and make sure you check spider access to your pages once you've set it up.
If you're moving hosts or changing an old design, don't leave your old pages stranded. They may already be indexed, so make us of that by setting up 301 redirects to the new pages.
Once your pages are uploaded, use a link checker to make sure everything has a home. Use W3C Link and code compliance checkers to evaluate potential problems.
Use browser compatibility checkers to see how your design looks in all major browsers. Don't forget to go back at least to IE6 !

We have an entire paper on Meta tag usage and prefer not to list that here. Google web tools will give you some useful insights into structuring meta tags, use them, or don't, at your peril.

Stage 3 - Visuals

If you've been heavily involved in the design layout of your website, you'll want some outside opinions on how it looks and works. And don't ask your friends, they'll just tell you it looks cool!
Aesthetics presents an entire problem of its own. How your site looks to you is not how it looks to anyone else. Check your wardrobe, if you still have yellow flower-power shirts, stay away from the aesthetic design and trust the opinion of your web designer. Our biggest headaches come at the template stage of creating a website. You can't tell people what music to like, nor can you tell them which artists they prefer, it's the same with website aesthetics.
Now that's over, navigate your pages and try to live the experience of the typical user. is it intuitive? Can the information be accessed quickly, in under 3 clicks? Is the content well structured, or will someone have to ponder, wondering what to click next to find the content? Is the actual navigation structure consistent from page to page? Are the images of sufficient quality or are you using clipart? what about page load speed, are you having to wait for content to appear.
Websites with shopping carts present an entirely different challenge. There's actually a science behind the presentation of a shopping cart to maximize conversions and minimize shopping cart abandonment. Some considerations - is everything secure and do we give the user the perception of having a safe shopping experience? How many opportunities does the user have to abandon an order and go to a competitor? Do we take them through the process intuitively? The psychology of shopping is that most shoppers feel guilt throughout the ordering process and are subconsciously looking for reasons not to complete the purchase. Don't give them any reasons to quit and you'll improve your conversions no end. This clearly is an in-depth subject so we'll stop here. Contact us if you need more help.

Stage 4 - Content

The Holy Grail of SEO is having good content - descriptive text in abundance. But there comes a point where the text/ppages start to impede the user-experience. Too much going on, too confusing, too many navigation buttons etc etc. One way around this is to create an 'articles' section or even a blog. That way people can access that area of your site if they need to, but it won't interfere with their browsing experience. Content attracts SE's into your site and gives them plenty to feed on. Keep it original, 300 words plus, and on theme as much as possible. Make it a part of your life to develop more and more content and you'll start to reap the benefits of your efforts. Consider article writing services (like ours) as an excellent way to build content at  reasonable cost.
If you go it alone, keep it sensible and write your texts for a human reader not a search engine. Use all of the HTML tools at your disposal such as -
Heading Tags, Alt Tags and Internal Links. Try to map out your site structure on paper, then show the links on paper before you start to code them. It will be a great reference tool when you begin writing new pages. For example, if you have a page somewhere that's really strong on the subject of apples, a month down the line, when you're writing a new article and making reference to apples, it's great to be able to see visually on paper that you have an optimized page on the subject, and you can add the page filename as a link in your new article without having to go looking for it. In doing this you'll constantly be re enforcing the theme of your important pages.
Avoid duplicate content and avoid mirror websites.
Use keywords in your page filenames, your directory filenames and your image filenames, but keep it sensible.
Make good use of anchor text, again using keywords.
Page file size should be less than around 160kb before images. There are programs where you can check loadspeeds on different internet connections, use them to try to attain a page load time under 10 seconds. When designing, you can take steps to have your textual content appear quickly and images later, this is better than having the entire page blank then everything appearing at once after a 10 second wait. Keep the user in mind!


Of course, when you do this thing for a living there are many more considerations, but the above should give you some insight and the ability to effectively audit your website. If you implement good stratagem and still rank poorly, there are many possible reasons, not least of which being that you or your designer may have screwed something up. Remember this, 99% of web design companies claim to have SEO services, but 95% of them really only say it because it's expected of them. They screw up and you foot the bill. Not to sound disparaging, but they do what they do best and it's not SEO, so seek out an expert. That's not to say you should pass it all along to an expert and step back from it. We believe it's critical that you develop a working knowledge of the concepts, terminology and principals of SEO, so that you can make good decisions when the time comes.