Being organically found in search engines has become one of the main goals for small and large businesses with an online presence. A key step to achieving good positioning is the SEO audit of your website because through this diagnosis, you can identify strengths, areas for improvement, and technical flaws in your website and use them as a starting point for optimizations.
In the previous article, Blas Giffuni conducted a live audit of the official website of the Colombian government: gov.co. In the first part of this article, we shared the initial steps to perform an SEO audit or diagnosis of a website, which you can replicate for your own audit. Now, let's continue with the second part of this audit process, so that you can apply these steps to your website and conduct a detailed examination of both internal and external elements of your site to improve your SEO strategy.
This time, Blas Giffuni along with Camilo Ramírez, will discuss the importance of evaluating key themes for your website and analyzing if Google is finding it for them, reviewing and optimizing the SEO of images, and finally, searching for the sitemap.xml. Let's continue!
Third step: evaluate the key themes of your website and if Google is finding it for them
A fundamental part of any SEO audit is to identify and determine the key themes or concepts through which you want users to find your website, i.e., those terms or search intentions through which you would like your business to be found on the Internet.
Therefore, the next step is to self-assess and investigate which contents of your website Google has indexed regarding the topics or terms of interest to your business. How is this done? Through the site: command. Enter the term of interest for your brand or business that you want to know which contents of your website Google is showing, and then use the site command. It should look like this: Key theme site
.com In the case of our audit of the Colombian government website, the analysis looks like this: Tourism site.co
Doing this search allows you to know which sections or pages Google knows about regarding a specific keyword within your website. In other words, this way you can know what type of information Google knows about a keyword within your domain. This does not reflect the position your website is in within Google, but it will allow you to know if Google is making you visible for the relevant terms for your business and if it is indexing and reading these topics. The above is important because it allows you to recognize if your website is capable of competing, and really, this competition is with yourself, which means that in terms of SEO, your main competitor is yourself, and you must constantly look for new ways to improve your average and positioning.
Fourth step: review and SEO optimization of images
A step often forgotten in SEO strategies is the review and optimization of website images. The images on your website are important because they can generate significant amounts of traffic and also help provide context to your content, accompanying and complementing the story you want to tell. Therefore, we recommend paying special attention to how you present the images because this will favor the organic positioning of your website. One way to analyze images is that, when searching for keywords using the site: command as we did in the previous step, you also analyze the images that appear in that result.
Tips for optimizing the SEO of images on your website: Use ALT tags and describe images using ALT text: alternate texts are a textual description that clearly describes what is shown in each image.
This, in terms of accessibility, allows blind and visually impaired people, who use screen readers, to know what the images on a website are about. Also, when a user's images do not load for different reasons, they will see the image description to know what it is about.
In terms of SEO, ALT texts can help Google better understand the content of an image and classify it. This can positively impact the positioning of your website because, in the end, everything translates into providing a better user experience to those browsing your site.
When writing the alternate texts for your images, we recommend that they be descriptive, specific, and coherent. In short, do not try to fill your ALT descriptions with keywords, always try to make the descriptions simply correspond to what is seen in the image.
Name image files correctly: we suggest that when you upload or export images to your website, do not upload them with generic or default file names. On the contrary, add a descriptive name that helps to relate what the image is about and provides context about it. This is a good practice described by Google in its image best practices manual.
What does it mean to name an image file well? It means that, instead of exporting a photo with a generic name like "IMG0143," name it "sierra-nevada-santa-marta," that is: a name consistent with the content in the image.
Some final recommendations for naming multimedia files are:
Separate words with hyphens, not underscores.
If you are in a country whose language includes special characters, such as Spanish, make sure that all image and multimedia files are named in lowercase and do not use accents, umlauts, or any other special character.
Fifth step: search for the sitemap.xml The Sitemap.
XML is a code file hosted on your server that lists all the URLs on your website and how relevant they are with respect to the homepage, and also when each of them was last updated. It is designed to help search engines in the crawling process, allowing them to evaluate and rank your pages more easily. You can do this search by typing the following into the Google search bar: Sitemap.xml site.com
When performing this search, you can analyze two things:
You will see if Google has access to the different URLs of your website.
You can see if the sitemaps are broken. (To fix this issue requires a more technical knowledge)
If in this search you find something that does not look like a sitemap. That is, if clicking on it does not take you to a list of URLs, there is a problem that you must investigate to avoid possible security breaches on your website.
Conclusion:
To achieve the strategic objectives of your website, the SEO audit or diagnosis is a fundamental first step, as it will allow you to detect problems and optimization points to improve the organic positioning of your online business in search engines. Remember that a very important part of the SEO analysis of a website occurs with tools that any of us have at our disposal. In this way, it is not necessary to start in the world of search engine positioning with tools that may cost hundreds of dollars. Along with the free tools described in part 1 and part 2 of this article, we also recommend keeping in mind the use of Google Search Console and constantly reviewing the robots.txt file.
Additionally, we invite you to continue reading our blog to learn more about search engine positioning.
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