Before starting your SEO strategy, make sure your website is free of glitches and optimized for search engines. Your on-site optimization helps search engines determine your authority and relevance to search terms and your ranking.

The technical audit examines your site for any technical issues that may affect your user experience and search engine rankings. Internal link optimization helps examine your site’s link structure, anchor text, and image links for errors and optimization opportunities.

# 1 – Technical audit
Start with a technical audit of your site to identify any technical issues that may affect the performance and ranking of the website. The technical audit looks at the aspects of your site that are important and identifies where errors occur, including:

• Your site visitors and crawlers have no patience for slow site speed. The faster the better!
• Search engines see links, anchors, and images as factors of website quality.
• Encoding errors can cause slow response time and server issues that affect overall quality.

# 2 – SEO analysis of websites

Once all the technical issues are resolved, proceed with conducting an SEO audit of your website:

• Examine the issues on the site that are relevant to search engine bots, website quality, and rankings.
• Create a Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt file for your site and tell search engines how to navigate and index your content.
• A temporary redirect, where an old URL is redirected to a new one, is confusing for search engines if you should redirect traffic to a new site with a permanent 301 redirect.
• If you use dynamic URLs, make sure they are search engine friendly and as simple as possible, and have an organized structure, such as http://www.example.com/category/sub-category/specific-service.com
• It is important to have a unique title tag (70 characters) for each page of your website. Engines display the title tag in search results, it’s what users will click to get to your site, so make it count!
• Search engines display the description tag (320 characters) below the title tag in search results; it is also the text snippet that appears automatically when the URL is shared on social media. As with title tags, your description tags must be unique for each page.
• The H1 header is the most important header on your page and is used by search engines to determine the relevance of your page to search terms. Make sure you have only one H1 on each of your web pages, subsequent titles should be H2-H4.
• Every web page should have some outgoing links to other high ranking pages, depending on the amount of content on a page, keep the number of links below 100.
• Image ALT attributes enrich the usability of the website and allow images to be ranked in the results.
• Check the page speed and loading time of your site! Sites with low page speed are not easy to use and can be ignored by search engines.
• Use responsive or mobile friendly web design to make sure your site looks and performs well on all types of devices. Search engines will also identify your site as mobile friendly when ranking in mobile search results. Identify specific aspects of your site that may affect performance on mobile devices.

# 3 – internal link optimization

Carefully optimize the anchor text for specific keywords! Search engines look for keywords within anchor text to understand what a web page is about and how it should be indexed.

• The texts of the links found on your website and the pages where they are.
• The total number of pages that have the link text.
• The authority of the link text when used as anchor text
• Various links to pages that are blocked from crawling (via Robots.txt or noindex tag).
• Links to pages that are listed as nofollow and will not pass ‘link juice’.
• Site-wide links are less valuable than links placed in text and surrounded by thematically relevant words.

Hiring SEO professionals to conduct a full SEO audit of your site will identify specific areas to improve your website’s performance and ranking.