Search Engine Optimization and Design Audit.

There are few things more important for your website than ensuring it 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 has been conducting SEO and Design Audits for over 13 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. This is a labor-intensive process where we utilize several in-house audit documents along with software tools, spreadsheets 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 we will provide you with all of the information necessary to take corrective actions on your website, which you can implement yourself through your webmaster, or we can do it for you for a fee.

We provide you with a full spectrum report, including but not limited to -

• Identification of your top landing and traffic pages (up to 25, including your home page)
• A detailed SEO and Design analysis of each page, identifying problem areas and corrective actions
• A complete navigation assessment of your website
• A full keyword selection assessment - we analyze your selections and present up to 600 alternatives
• Keyword Competition assessment - targeting the right keywords is critical, but are yours too competitive?
  
• Detailed Meta tags analysis with corrective actions
  
• A full content review of your top 25 landing pages
• A full Design report and analysis with corrective actions
• Social Media Analysis
  
• And much more

With our Audit service will give you the complete low down and dirty on your website and provide you with all of the information you need to fix it.

BONUS - Get a free 1 hour SKYPE session - we'll answer your implementation questions via SKYPE or Email.

ORDER SEO / Design Audit Special Offer $999.00 Design / SEO Audit $499.00 USD Add Marketing Plan $799.00 USD

We can perform this audit for you for $499.00 which includes a full review of your website with detailed analysis of up to 25 of your key content pages. OPTION - add a comprehensive marketing plan to your order. We'll be getting to know your site in detail during our audit, why not let us create a full customized marketing plan to accompany your audit report.

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.

Stage One - Tools

• Webmaster Account and analytics account assessment.
• XML sitemap generation, cron assessment, GWT inclusion and indexing rate
• Links / broken links / Crawl rate
  

We'll need access to your Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics accounts. If you don't have one we'll create temporary accounts so we can see your site as Google sees it, for the purpose of our analysis. We'll report on problem areas and show you how to fix them.

For a quick self-check - do a Google search for “site:www.yoursite .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 being picked up by the Google crawlers. Or, you might have a problem with your robots.txt file that is excluding sections of your website. We'll run a full analysis and create a report for corrective actions.

Stage Two - Design Considerations

• Structure / software / CMS / Coding analysis report
• For CMS accounts
  
• Permalink check
• session ID's
• index page optimization
• .HTACCESS review
• deep-link barrier assessment
• SEO Plugin reviews
• Navigation analysis, review and correctives
• Spider assessment with site-mapping
• www/ non www assessment and changes in GWT
• Images / Graphics / Media analysis
• Page load/speed analysis and correctives
• Java / scripting assessment
• Gzip / Caching
• robots.txt
• Frames / iFrames
  
• Hyperlinks and anchor text assessment/correctives

For a quick self-check - 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, WordPress, 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. We'll go through this in-depth and make recommendations to you.

Decide whether to use http://www.yoursite or http://yoursite and stick with it throughout. Mixing both dilutes your link effectiveness, set the appropriate option ins Google webmaster tools. 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.
Use browser compatibility checkers to see how your design looks in all major browsers. Don't forget to go back at least to IE6 !

Stage 3 - Visuals and User Interaction Assessment / Corrective action report

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 evaluation
• Graphics use, presentation versus page load-times
• Layout analysis, ease of use, navigation
• eCommerce features / functionality / security
• Passive interaction analysis/correctives
• Bounce rate assessments/correctives
• Time on page analysis/correctives
• More..
  

For a quick self-check - 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? 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

• Content analysis/correctives report
• Keyword density
• Thematic assessment
• Copyright / Content ownership assessment/correctives
  

For a quick self-check - The Holy Grail of SEO is having good content - descriptive text in abundance. But there comes a point where the text/pages 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 load-speeds 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 as we do, there are many more considerations. The ones listed above are just the ones we're prepared to share with the casual visitor, our Audit customers get the full treatment.

As for those looking just for the quick tips, well the above should give you some insights and the ability to make a casual audit of your website. If you implement good design and SEO strategies and still rank poorly there are many possible reasons - perhaps 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.

With our Audit service will give you the complete low down and dirty on your website and provide you with all of the information you need to fix it.

BONUS - Get a free 1 hour SKYPE session - we'll answer your implementation questions via SKYPE or Email.

ORDER SEO / Design Audit Special Offer $999.00 Design / SEO Audit $499.00 USD Add Marketing Plan $799.00 USD

We can perform this audit for you for $499.00 which includes a full review of your website with detailed analysis of up to 25 of your key content pages. OPTION - add a comprehensive marketing plan to your order. We'll be getting to know your site in detail during our audit, why not let us create a full customized marketing plan to accompany your audit report.

Simply order and pay for this service, then watch your email, we'll send a full questionnaire with all of the information we need from you to get started. An Audit typically takes 4-7 business days from receipt of information, a little longer if you don't have Google analytics and webmaster tools accounts.

For the Marketing plan option, allow us an additional 2 days.

This is an extremely labor-intensive process so we do NOT offer any money-back guarantees unless we fail to deliver the report to you as outlined above.

If you have any questions, please use the contact form here.