What is a Website Health Check?
Monday, January 25, 2010
by Maria
Whenever we are approached by a potential client to rebuild an
existing website or undertake a search engine optimisation (SEO)
programme, or to increase web traffic, we always recommend that a
website audit report is undertaken first.
A website audit reviews the technical structure of a website and
also reports on layout (for the user experience) and content and
links for search engine rankings.
We consider the technical structure of the website to be the
most important component of a website audit. If the structure
is fubared, then no amount of content updating or link building can
improve the visitor numbers or increase sales.
The results can be very surprising. We have completed
website audit reports on websites with modern layouts and really
nice designs, but built so that the website would only appear if
the company name was entered as the search phrase. In this
case, the only visitors coming to the site are people who already
know the name of the company. This website would not attract
new visitors because it wouldn't appear in any search results.
Another recently completed website audit was for a website that
was technically sound, but the main navigation menu (which was at
the bottom of the page) was different on every page. For a
user this is confusing and frustrating, and it is easy enough to
return to the search results to find the next website.
Technical Issues:
- Canonical URLs: multiple domain names that point to a
website. Where a website has more than one URL, one should be
chosen as the target URL and the other URLs should be pointed to
it. This is a common problem and it reduces the page rank for
the website, but it should be a simple matter for a developer to
remedy.
- Use of images for text: where text is converted into an
image instead of html text. Images appear as blank areas to
Google's 'crawlers', so any text stored as an image will not return
search results.
- Search engine indexing: web pages need to be 'indexed' by
a search engine for it to appear in a search result. There
are several different scenarios that would cause crawlers to ignore
a site or to incompletely crawl a site.
- Slow page loading: overly complicated scripts,
table-based programming and large images can cause slow page
loading. This would mostly affect the user experience (and
they leave the site) but can also affect search engine
indexing.
Design and content:
- Where possible we test the keyword phrases used by
visitors.
- Check whether the website conveys the right messages to
visitors. It should be immediately obvious what the website
is about.
- Check meta data - titles and descriptions - are present and
optimised.
- We check that the overall layout is easy to navigate and give
our opinion on the user-experience.
Links
- Links are the single most important factor that impacts page
rank. Google, and other search engines, use links to
determine what the website is about and to measure website
quality. Links to relevant industry-related websites are what
count.
- We check as best we can the internal, inbound and outbound
links for a website.
Recommendations
When the results show that the website is structurally sound, we
always include recommendations to the website owner that they
themselves may be able to implement. We make recommendations
on content, meta data and external factors that will improve
website traffic.
If the structure or other circumstances, e.g. high costs,
dictate that the website is rebuilt, we guarantee to resolve all of
the issues that we find in the original website.
The website audit report collates the tangible and intangible
parts that form a website presence on the Internet and helps to
focus effort and money on the areas where it is needed the
most.
For a website owner that wants more business it is a great
opportunity to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their
website and to find the area to focus their efforts.
