If you carry out an SEO audit it will show you the areas that you need to work on first and where you need to focus the most attention. You can easily split an audit into three main sections and when you have been through everything you will know just where to start. Below is what we would recommend doing.



1. The Technical Aspect

This is basically the main structural elements of your website and these should all put in order before you begin any campaign. For that reason it is important to start here with your SEO audit. This should include the following:

a. Coding - it is important that any code on your site can be readable by search engines. You should check the quality of it and check the number of errors that appear. These are not necessarily a killer but may indicate some problems. You should try and limit the Flash that is used on your site as search engines are not able to read this properly yet.

b. Page Loading - you should see how long it takes for the pages on your website to load. It will affect your rankings if the time is too long.

c. Navigation - Make sure you have text links for your website navigation. Although it is great to create effects with Flash or Javascript this will not be good for your SEO. The search engines will not be able to follow these links and so may not be able to find all the pages on your website.

d. URL Structure - It is an absolute necessity that your website URLs contain keywords and descriptive phrases for your pages. If this is not the case then you should be correcting it immediately.

e. Page Titles - Make sure all the page titles on your website are unique and are descriptive of the page they relate to.

f. Pages Indexed - You should check the pages of your website that the search engines have indexed. If there are pages missing then you need to figure out why and fix this as soon as possible.

g. Duplicate content - You need to make sure there are no duplicate content issues, particularly on the home page. Many home links on sites don't link to the main domain name, this should be illuminated as soon as possible.

2. Review Your Content

This is slightly simpler than the technical audit and if you have a good content management system can be corrected very quickly.

a. Keyword Inclusion - Have you ensured you are including your keywords in your content? Check what density your competitors are using and try to emulate this.

b. Linkworthy - have you created interesting content that people will want to link to? If the answer is no then you might want to write something that people will be interested in.

c. Readability - you should check the level of competence that you need to have to understand your website. If the level is too high not only will your visitors fail to understand you but the search engines might have problems as well.

3. Are you Trustworthy?

The search engines will check whether your site is trustworthy before they rank it. Some of these things you can control and some you cannot however this is probably the area where the most work will be needed.

a. Links to your website - the search engines what to know that other sites trust you enough to link to you. The more links you have the more popular and trustworthy you are. This should be a focus of you campaign as it is the hardest to improve. You should see how many links you have, check the PageRank of sites linking to you and the anchor text used. You should also check the pages the links are pointing towards.

b. Domain Age - this is important as the older your domain name the more chance you can be trusted as a reputable website. It is important to know how long the site has been live for, how long the domain has been registered and how long it is registered for.

c. Links from your Website - To build the trust your need to provide your visitors with resources. However make sure that any links from your site are to high quality, reputable sites so as not to damage your reputation.

Once you have been through all of the above you should have a good idea of the main areas that need working on.