Do you know how can we improve the effectiveness of the SEO? What is the essence to get the maximum benefits of the optimization techniques? You will be surprised to know that lack of quick audit might lead to be competitive advantage for the competitors.SEO Professionals should know how to ensure quick and effective audit. This post is to help you who wanted to ensure that you get the competitive advantage. This would take just 10 to 20 minutes...

SEO Audit Techniques (A Quick Review)

1. Be a Spider-Man

Check the pages the way spider does. Are you wondering how you can do it? Stop your speculations and check the tool called “SEO Browser”. Analyze the accessibility of content and links by crawler. Once through with this, you can plan the content strategy to improve the visibility of your website.

2. Google Webmaster Tool

Use the Google Webmaster Tool to identify significant changes in navigation, content or URL. Generate a report to find out duplicate tags (Known as ‘Keyword Cannibalization’), if any using Diagnostics.

3. Shift in Traffic

Identify any unusual shift in traffic. Check Web Analytics data for traffic. Analyze the historical stats for non-branded search traffic. This may help you in identifying root problems for further analysis.

4. User Friendly Architecture

For a moment, imagine that you are a visitor and then review the site. See if the site has proper navigation structure. Find out if internal linking is logical and makes sense. Note down the flaws and plan to sort out in your action plan.

More tips are covered in the PART – II of Edge over Competition - Site Audit (SEO)

As discussed in PART – I of Edge over Competition - Site Audit (SEO), here are more on how to ensure quick and effective audit in just 10 to 20 minutes...

5. Indexed Pages (Google)

Search for “site:www.website.com” in Google to check the number of indexed pages. Then check the numbers shown by Google Webmaster Tool. Compare these numbers to how many pages you think you have. You would find discrepancy in the results and this will lead to identification of another problem which would need your attention to improve the SEO performance of the campaign.

6. Canonical URLs Issue

To do this, check if the non-www versions of the pages have SE’s friendly redirect

(301). Find out if there are any pages having more than one URL. For example, the home page could have multiple URLs www.website.com , www.website.com/index , website.com/index.html

7. Non-Unique Content

Check out the amount of text on each page. Often E-commerce sites have thousands of pages with no content or have almost same content with minor changes. Such pages are known as ‘Template Content’ and are considered as low quality pages by SE’s.

8. Check XML-Sitemap File

Make sure that the XML file does have canonical versions of a URL. Presence of different URL in site map may lead to duplicity.

9. Review Robots.txt File

Use Google Webmaster Tool and use the built-in robots.txt checker tool. This section will show you the pages which Google considered as blocked ones. Ensure that important pages are not excluded by Robots.txt.

Once done with the checks, you will be in a good position to identify the major areas to work upon. These tips serve a base for a website health check and help you in identifying root problems.

Secure Sockets Layer is a protocol (by Netscape) for transmitting private documents through the Internet. The Secure Sockets Layer protects data transfer over http using server’s SSL Certificate encryption. When a browser points to a secured domain, an SSL handshake process establishes the secure session between the server and the client with unique session keys. An SSL Certificate contains a public key and a private key, public key is used to encrypt information and private key is used to interpret it. Generally, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https: instead of http:

If a user attempts to submit personal information to an unsecured web site (site not protected with a valid SSL certificate), the browser’s built-in security mechanism triggers a warning to the user, reminding that the site is not secure and that sensitive data might be intercepted by third parties.

For the best security practices, one should install a unique certificate on each server and choose a True 128-bit Certificate by purchasing a Server Gated Cryptography (SGC) (enables 128 or 256 Bit SSL encryption depending on the browser, operating system and host server). To install SSL certificate, you need the original private key, which was created when you first generated your Certificate Signing Request (CSR). If you cannot find or access it, you cannot use the certificate and you have to get a new one. A unique certificate keeps private keys protected, and an SGC enabled certificate ensures that every site visitor (using any browser or operating system) connects at the highest level of encryption the system is capable of.

For more information please visit http://blog.areawebsolutions.com/what-is-an-ssl-certificate.html.