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Website audit is a full analysis of all the factors that affect a website's visibility in search engines. This standard method gives a complete insight into any website, overall traffic, and individual pages. Website audit is completed solely for marketing purposes. The goal is to detect weak points in campaigns that affect web performance. [1]
The website audit starts with a general analysis of a website aimed at revealing the actions needed to improve search engine optimization (SEO). Many tools offer recommendations on how to raise the website rankings in search that can include on-page and off-page SEO audits such as broken links, duplicate meta descriptions and titles, HTML validation, website statistics, error pages, indexed pages, and site speed. [2] A site audit is applicable for all online businesses and improves different aspects of the websites.
There are many reasons to do a website audit, but in most cases SEO and content marketing are the main ones. A website audit made for SEO purposes discovers weak spots in a website's SEO score and helps understand the state of SEO. Content audit is used to analyze the engagement and what changes have to be made to the content strategy to enhance the site's performance. [3]
There are multiple types of site audits, including the following: [4]
All of these audits can form a part of the same audit. Each one is made to make sure that you have powerful and reliable system in place. It shows the unidentified dangers that can bring you down, tells what needs to change and what's working well and what's not good, and gives practical recommendations and insights into what need to prioritize more. All website audits start with site health audits.
Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable. The purpose of cloaking is sometimes to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed. However, it can also be a functional technique for informing search engines of content they would not otherwise be able to locate because it is embedded in non-textual containers, such as video or certain Adobe Flash components. Since 2006, better methods of accessibility, including progressive enhancement, have been available, so cloaking is no longer necessary for regular SEO.
Relative to some web resource, a backlink is a link from some other website to that web resource. A web resource may be a website, web page, or web directory.
The anchor text, link label, or link text is the visible, clickable text in an HTML hyperlink. The term "anchor" was used in older versions of the HTML specification for what is currently referred to as the "a element", or <a>. The HTML specification does not have a specific term for anchor text, but refers to it as "text that the a element wraps around". In XML terms, the anchor text is the content of the element, provided that the content is text.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings and increase the Call to action (CTA) on the website.
In online marketing, a landing page, sometimes known as a "lead capture page", "single property page", "static page", "squeeze page" or a "destination page", is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. Landing pages are used for lead generation. The actions that a visitor takes on a landing page are what determine an advertiser's conversion rate. A landing page may be part of a microsite or a single page within an organization's main web site.
Web content development is the process of researching, writing, gathering, organizing, and editing information for publication on websites. Website content may consist of prose, graphics, pictures, recordings, movies, or other digital assets that could be distributed by a hypertext transfer protocol server, and viewed by a web browser.
The sandbox effect is a theory about the way Google ranks web pages in its index. It is the subject of much debate—its existence has been written about since 2004, but not confirmed, with several statements to the contrary.
Social media optimization (SMO) is the use of a number of outlets and communities to generate publicity to increase the awareness of a product, service brand or event. Types of social media involved include RSS feeds, social news, bookmarking sites, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, video sharing websites, and blogging sites. SMO is similar to search engine optimization (SEO) in that the goal is to generate web traffic and increase awareness for a website. SMO's focal point is on gaining organic links to social media content. In contrast, SEO's core is about reaching the top of the search engine hierarchy. In general, social media optimization refers to optimizing a website and its content to encourage more users to use and share links to the website across social media and networking sites.
Keyword research is a practice search engine optimization (SEO) professionals use to find and analyze search terms that users enter into search engines when looking for products, services, or general information. Keywords are related to search queries.
Google Search Console is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status, search queries, crawling errors and optimize visibility of their websites.
In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website. Briefly, link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness.
Competitor backlinking is a search engine optimization strategy that involves analyzing the backlinks of competing websites within a vertical search. The outcome of this activity is designed to increase organic search engine rankings and to gain an understanding of the link building strategies used by business competitors.
In electronic commerce, conversion marketing is marketing with the intention of increasing conversions—that is, site visitors who are paying customers.
In website governance, a content audit is the process of evaluating content elements and information assets on some part or all of a website.
Hummingbird is the codename given to a significant algorithm change in Google Search in 2013. Its name was derived from the speed and accuracy of the hummingbird. The change was announced on September 26, 2013, having already been in use for a month. "Hummingbird" places greater emphasis on natural language queries, considering context and meaning over individual keywords. It also looks deeper at content on individual pages of a website, with improved ability to lead users directly to the most appropriate page rather than just a website's homepage.
Google PageSpeed is a family of tools by Google, Inc. designed to help optimize website performance. It was introduced at a Developer Conference in 2010. There are four main components of PageSpeed family tools:
The domain authority of a website describes its relevance for a specific subject area or industry. Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. This relevance has a direct impact on its ranking by search engines, trying to assess domain authority through automated analytic algorithms. The relevance of domain authority on website-listing in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) of search engines led to the birth of a whole industry of Black-Hat SEO providers, trying to feign an increased level of domain authority. The ranking by major search engines, e.g., Google’s PageRank is agnostic of specific industry or subject areas and assesses a website in the context of the totality of websites on the Internet. The results on the SERP page set the PageRank in the context of a specific keyword. In a less competitive subject area, even websites with a low PageRank can achieve high visibility in search engines, as the highest ranked sites that match specific search words are positioned on the first positions in the SERPs.
Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for measuring the quality of web pages. It can be run against any web page, public or, requiring authentication. Google Lighthouse audits performance, accessibility, and search engine optimization factors of web pages, this is the major difference from Google PageSpeed, the Google Lighthouse provides more detail information. It also includes the ability to test progressive web applications for compliance with standards and best practices. Google Lighthouse is developed by Google and aims to help web developers, the tool can be run by using Chrome browser extension or by using terminal (command) for batch auditing a list of URLs. Google's recommendation is for using the online version of Page Speed Insights as of 15th May 2015.