Auditing your website is an important way to ensure you’re providing the best possible experience to your visitors and putting your best foot forward with the search engines. In part one of this series, we discussed how to evaluate your website’s meta data and content. In part two, we outlined what to look for in design elements and usability factors. In this third and final part of the series, we’ll explain the technical and quality issues you should monitor.

Technical Issues

As with evaluating the design elements of your website, you may need the assistance of a web developer and/or SEO professional when looking at technical issues. Typically, you want to ensure your website has the following:

• Robots.txt: This is a text file that instructs the search engine robots how to crawl and index your website’s pages. It is important to include instructions for the search engines, especially if there are pages on your site that you do not want them to read through.
• Analytics tracking: In order to track the performance of your website, you need to enable a tracking program. Google Analytics is free to use and simple to sign up for with any existing Google account. While every program is different, the Google Analytics platform can track overall traffic, referral traffic, search engine traffic, visitor demographics, conversions, and much more.
• Schema.org: This is a set of microdata that can be added to the HTML of your website in order to improve the way it is represented in search results. Google, Yahoo, and Bing utilize this markup, so you’re not just pleasing Google by utilizing it. You can learn more about how and why to use Schema here.

You also want to make sure your website does NOT have the following:

• Crawl Errors: There are a number of possible errors on your website that can hinder the ability of the search engines to crawl your website. Typically, the errors you should be most concerned about are 404 errors, or not found errors. If your website has 404 / not found errors, this means there are pages on your website that are no longer found, meaning the users visiting those pages are getting nowhere. Not only does this provide a poor user experience, but it can also confuse the search engines and provide them with a dead-end when trying to crawl the particular page. Google Webmaster Tools, another free tool you can use with your Google account, can monitor such issues.
• Malware: This type of software can be extremely damaging to the computers of your website visitors. If your website it hacked, you should enlist the help of a web development professional to ensure that no malware has been installed and that you’re not posing any threats to your audience.

Quality Issues

All of the elements we’ve discussed in this series (meta data, content, design, and usability) contribute to the quality of your website, and how both users and the search engines see it. However, there are additional quality factors and potential issues you should consider:

• Load Time: There are many free load-time testers available on the web, including a tool from Google. Google’s tool will even give you ways to adjust your website to better page speed. The faster your site loads, the better the experience you’re providing your visitors and the easier you’re making it for the search engines to crawl through.
• Quality Scores: There are a number of free and paid tools that can evaluate your website’s quality scores. Typically, you want to track your Page Authority, Domain Authority, mozTrust, mozRank, Domain Expiration / Creation Dates, and more. These items can all contribute to the quality assessment of your website. While you don’t want to focus all of your efforts on raising and maintaining particular numbers, you do want to at least keep an eye on them, so as to give you a good idea of where you stand. Check out Raven (paid) and the MozBar (free) for tools that allow you to track such scores.

While auditing your website can be a time-consuming and extensive process, it is worth your time and effort to keep up with the process on a regular basis. Audits can ensure you’re always presenting your agency in the best way possible. You don’t want to miss any chance at an opportunity due to the dissatisfaction of visitors or the search engines.