For a business in the 21st century, a well-functioning website is the foundation of your public visibility. In order to optimize your website’s standing, it’s important to make sure its different components are optimized themselves. At Fujisan, that’s where we want to help. An on-site audit is a simple way to improve your website’s functionality, visibility, and discoverability online.

Here’s what we check for:

Title Tags

Title tags are the heading for your page’s Google search result listing. When auditing title tags, we look for missing or duplicate tags, tags that are too long or short, and tags’ keyword usage.

Here you’ll get the best result with one unique title tag per page. We also recommend being cognizant of the character length — 65 or fewer characters is the optimal length (that’s around 600 or fewer pixels). Always include your page’s primary keyword in the title. When in doubt, a good way to structure your title tag is the primary keyword, leading to the secondary keyword, ending in your brand name. Title tags are one of the most important ranking factors, so you absolutely must use your keywords here.

Header Tags

Next, we’ll evaluate your header tags. Here we look at your headers, or “H tags,” which go in descending order of importance from H1 to H6. Like other categories, we’ll also look for missing headers, duplicate headers, and out-of-order headers.

Because of the hierarchy of H tags, limit each page to one H1 tag each — but always make sure you have that one H1 tag! Ideally, you should include that page’s primary keyword in the H1 tag, since search engines look to headers to determine the subject of the page.

While you shouldn’t use more than one H1 tag, you can use multiple H2 to H6 tags per page as long as they maintain their descending order. In fact, we recommend this practice, as these lower H tags are quite helpful for organizing and formatting content. After all, a page that’s just one huge block of text usually results in a reader glazing over the content and not staying for as long. Headers — along with images and the occasional bullet or numbered list — break up content to be more engaging and accessible. 

Site Content

This is the most dynamic component of your website we’ll examine. There are a handful of ways your site’s content may be under optimized for search engine viability, but, luckily, they’re all straightforward fixes.

A common one, for example, is poorly integrated keywords. This boils down to how well you’ve identified and implemented keywords within your content. A website that uses key terms for relevant users has an advantage over a site whose content is vague or convoluted. The former would see increased traffic driven by well-utilized keywords connecting with potential users.

Another less-than-optimal trait on your site could be the concentration and variety of content. Essentially, search engines rank you higher if your content is clear about A) what you do and B) why you’re a valuable source of information (or products). While keywords are important, they’ll be buried in the internet’s abyss without a meaningful “supporting cast.”

What you want to avoid is “thin content.” Thin content can manifest in different ways, but at its core is content lacking in value. That can mean filler pages or pages with little to no content (600 or more words are ideal for posts), but also pages with little original content. So, if you’re planning on duplicating a bunch of pages and just making some minor changes to rank higher — save your energy.

On the other hand, thin content can also be just a jumble of keywords, alluded to above. It comes down to Google’s algorithm getting better at determining a user’s search intent and what’s subsequently valuable for them. Which, through extension, means that in order to rank highly, you have to stop trying to “hack” the SEO system and just write sincere, legitimate content. At the end of the day, valuable words are valuable words — there are no shortcuts.

Speaking of content, a highly-ranked website adds new content regularly. It doesn’t have to be complicated or over-the-top but having new content that’s published consistently is important. Blogs are a common version of this, and event pages or static content can work too. The most important thing (beyond making sure the content’s not thin!) is that it’s updated on a regular basis.

The last part of the site content audit is, for brands providing multiple services, that one page per service is ideal. We recommend staying away from a generic “services” page where you list everything in a bullet point list. Instead, dedicating one page to each of your services will result in a higher rank.

Images and Their Tags

For image auditing, we check for missing alt tags and alt tags over 100 characters. Remember, alt tags are important; be as descriptive as possible without going too ham on the length. Both search spiders and users who are hard-of-sight rely on these tags to know an image’s content. Where applicable — stop us if you’ve heard this before — use a relevant keyword. Same thing with an image’s file name. Choose a descriptive name that’s not too long and, if possible, include a keyword.

URL Structure

Next, we analyze a website’s URL structures. Specifically, we check for static versus dynamic URLs, URL lengths, and keyword usage.

For web crawlers’ sake, it’s important for URLs to be readable. Hence, static URLs function better for SEO purposes than dynamic. That’s because static URLs’ stability allows them to be more quickly indexed; plus, a static URL can have more keywords present, while a dynamic URL is a usually a jumble of different, changing parameters. While we’re at it: separate the words in your URLs with dashes, not underscores. This is because search crawlers see dashes as spaces to separate words and doesn’t process underscores in the same way. If you use underscores, your URL /fujisan-is-awesome would turn into /fujisanisawesome.

Other than being keyword-rich, ideally a URL is no longer than 115 characters, maximum. Also, while static URLs emphasizing page keywords are preferred, if URL parameters can’t be avoided, you can use Google Search Console to tell site crawlers to ignore these parameters — for more in-depth information, check out Google’s own explanation. Lastly, always use a canonical tag (rel=“canonical”) to denote each page’s preferred URL version.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are those text snippets that appear underneath the page title in a Google search. They’re an online elevator pitch of sorts to users scrolling through search results. When auditing websites, we check for missing descriptions, duplicate descriptions, and overly lengthy or too short of descriptions.

For your site, we recommend one unique meta description per page, preferably less than 160 characters. A good meta description tells the user about the content they provide in such a way to pique the user’s interest — because of this, we recommend writing in an active, concise voice. Also, you’ll often benefit by ending your description in a call to action, which can help improve click-through rate. This is because, while meta descriptions themselves aren’t a direct ranking factor for search engines, well-optimized descriptions entice more users to click, giving your page a higher volume of users, increasing your authority, and subsequently improving your SEO ranking.

Internal Linking

Finally, we look at internal linking. This one’s pretty self-explanatory but with a few tricks. The basics are that we check for header and footer links and hyperlinks within your content. But, in the world of SEO, not all links are created equal.

For example, it’s better to link specific, keyword text rather than a generic “click here” for internals. Don’t code your main navigation in JavaScript, since there’s some debate among SEO professionals as to whether or not all search crawlers can access linked pages coded in JavaScript.

If you want to get a bit more detailed, prioritize linking to your key pages instead of sending the majority of content links to lesser-value pages. This is because Google uses internal links to determine which site pages are “key,” so linking more to low-value pages elevates them above pages you want users to see.

These components are the focus of our on-site audits. Headers, images, internal links, URLs, titles, meta descriptions, and content each make up just a portion of your site but, when those are optimized, the whole machine works better for you. A couple quick changes to each, and your brand’s online viability is instantly revitalized.

Need a refresher on why an SEO audit is important? Check out our previous blog post: What is an SEO Audit – Part 1: Introduction.

The next blog post is Part 3 of our SEO audit series where we review technical SEO and off-page SEO elements.