SEO Audit Checklist

What is a SEO audit?

A SEO audit is a process for evaluating the healthiness of a web site in a number of areas. what needs to change so that the performance of the web site in search engines is improved.

Why it important to SEO audit your web site on a regular basis

Things change very quickly in the SEO industry and what is working today may not work in 6 months from now. It is necessary to perform regular SEO audits (at least 2 times per year) to ensure that your web site is up-to-date with the latest developments.

Helpful tools for doing a site audit:
Web Developer Toolbar
User Agent Add-on
Firebug
Link Checker
SEObook Toolbar
Xenu
Screaming Frog
Your own scraper

 

A quick summary of some of the data collected –

• Errors – Client & server errors (No responses, 4XX, 5XX)
• Redirects – (3XX, permanent or temporary)
• External Links – All followed links and their subsequent status codes
• URI Issues – Non ASCII characters, underscores, uppercase characters, dynamic uris, long over 115 characters
• Duplicate Pages – Hash value / MD5checksums lookup for pages with duplicate content
• Page Title – Missing, duplicate, over 65 characters, short, pixel width truncation, same as h1, or multiple
• Meta Description – Missing, duplicate, over 156 characters, short, pixel width truncation or multiple
• Meta Keywords – Mainly for reference as it’s only (barely) used by Yahoo.
• H1 – Missing, duplicate, over 70 characters, multiple
• H2 – Missing, duplicate, over 70 characters, multiple
• Meta Robots – Index, noindex, follow, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir etc
• Meta Refresh – Including target page and time delay
• Canonical link element & canonical HTTP headers
• X-Robots-Tag
• rel=“next” and rel=“prev”
• File Size
• Page Depth Level
• Inlinks – All pages linking to a URI
• Outlinks – All pages a URI links out to
• Anchor Text – All link text. Alt text from images with links
• Follow & Nofollow – At link level (true/false)
• Images – All URIs with the image link & all images from a given page. Images over 100kb, missing alt text, alt text over 100 characters
• User-Agent Switcher – Crawl as Googlebot, Bingbot, Yahoo! Slurp, mobile user-agents or your own custom UA.
• Redirect Chains – Discover redirect chains and loops.
• Custom Source Code Search – The spider allows you to find anything you want in the source code of a website! Whether that’s analytics code, specific text, or code etc. (Please note – This is not a data extraction or scraping feature yet.)
• XML Sitemap Generator – You can create a basic XML sitemap using the SEO spider.

SEO Audit checklist

Item					Description
ON-SITE SEO
1			Titles are unique for each page?
2			Titles length is between 50 – 65 characters?
3			Description tag is between 150-160 characters?
4			Description tag is not keyword stuffed?
5			Permanent Link structure (URL) format?
6			H1 Headings for title?
7			Use of H2 and H3 for subheadings
8			Small paragraphs and use of bold, italics
9			Is there a unique logo for the web site?
10			Is there a favicon?
11			Content on the web site is fresh?
12			Content length on post pages?
13			Internal linking – Do you link internal pages?
14			Internal linking – Use of anchor text (is it varied?)
15			Trying to rank for high competitive keywords?
16			Is there an ALT tag for all images?
17			Are image files names descriptive?
18			Image file size is optimized?
19			Blog comments have the ‘nofollow’ tag?
20			External links have the ‘nofollow’ tag?
21			Banner ads have the ‘nofollow’ tag?
22			Are pages with duplicate or no content, noindex and nofollow?
23			Too many ads above the fold?
24			Checked for invalid use of 301 and 302 redirects?
25			Site implements rel=canonical to identify the original content?
26			Site checked for broken links?
27			Page speed: Average time to load home page?
28			Page speed: Average time to load other pages?
29			Google Authorship status implemented?
30			Are most important pages linked to from home page?
31			Are most important pages linked to from Sidebar?
32			Is there a user sitemap (html) in the main menu?
33			Is there a ‘related posts’ section below each detail page?
34			Is there an author for all site pages?
35			Is there an About, Contact and Privacy policy page?
36			Is there a breadcrumb on all pages?
37			Is there a custom 404 page?
WEB SITE CONTROL
38	Is the web site registered on Google Webmaster tools?
39	Is the web site registered on Bing Webmaster tools?
40	Checked robots.txt?
41	Is there a valid XML Sitemap?
42	Is the web site registered with Google Analytics?