subject: A few top tips on reviewing the SEO potential on your site [print this page] A few top tips on reviewing the SEO potential on your site
Performing an SEO Technical Audit needn't be as difficult as it sounds. Google looks at a whole range of factors when it comes to evaluating websites for increased exposure in its natural search results, and at last count recent estimates suggest that there are in excess of 200 ranking factors, however in terms of getting the best results for your website, you only need to address a small number of factors.
It's important to keep in mind that the majority of benefit you will receive through SEO will be achieved through building links to your website this should ideally take up about 80% of the time you spend on your optimisation. However, there is still a lot of potential you can harness from your on-site activity, and this mainly revolves around optimisation of you Meta data, adding additional fresh content to all of your top category pages and around your main target terms, increasing the crawl rate of your website, applying internal linking and addressing any canonicalisation or potential duplicate content issues.
The main on-page factor that you will need to address is your page titles. All page titles on your website should be unique, include a target keyword and be less that 65 characters inc. whitespace in length. Do not stuff your page titles and always keep you users in mind (your visitors will read your page titles after all, they have to give them an idea on what the page is actually about). Another good way to leverage more SEO benefit from your website is add additional content.
Additional content will invariably help your website rank for what are called long-tail variation terms. These terms are generally more than four words in length and are generally unique i.e. they have never been made before. The main benefit to ranking for these terms is that they generally signal a far stronger level of buyer intent than generic terms and more often than not they make up the aggregate share of traffic to a particular website. The aggregate share of long-tail terms to your website will typically drive more conversions through your website than any one or two generic terms.
