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TechTalk #4 How You Can Easily Conduct a Mini Site Audit

    Last Updated on May 17, 2023

    How You Can Easily Conduct a Mini Site Audit

    I am really excited to offer this new playlist of tech talks, together with Bridget Willard, and hope you will find them useful. An accessible net is only possible if we all understand how to use it. Let’s get everyone using and understanding the tools available!

    You can find our TechTalk Playlist on YouTube right here!

    “What I Can Do Without Calling an Agency?” Especially for small businesses and nonprofits, money can be tight. It’s often great to save a few dollars and do things by yourself, right? Of course. This TechTalk is meant to help with the big question “Why Should I Conduct a Website Audit?” It might not be something you ask yourself, but you really should.

    Why Should I Conduct a Website Audit?

    Do you go for medical checkups? Service checkups for your car? Then why not do the same for your website? It might save you a lot of money to ensure your website is running smoothly by checking it once in a while. If it breaks, it will cost you more!

    Ask yourself:

    • + Is there a problem on my website?
    • + What is the problem?
    • + Why is this a problem?
    • + How can we solve this problem?

    This TechTalk is a part of our Technical Optimisation Made Easy series!

    What are we covering in TechTalk #4?

    Why is Mobile Optimisation Important to My Website?

    It’s been more than six years since Google’s Mobile-First Indexing update went live. It means that if your website is not mobile-friendly, then people searching on a mobile device will not see your website in the SERPs. Today most websites are mobile-friendly because it is built into any CMS-based Theme. Like this one, you are now reading.

    If you are not sure how your website works on a mobile device you can check on different types of phones and tablets yourself, or check an emulator like https://ready.mobi or those found at https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-emulators-for-pc-655308/.

    If your website isn’t working as you would like when viewed on a mobile device, you may want to contact your webmaster.

    Why is My Website SSL Certificate (HTTPS) Important to My Website?

    Google wants to deliver SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) of safe websites. A website using an SSL certificate (seen as https:// URL in your browser).

    HTTPS means Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure and is a protocol to transfer data securely. Using an SSL certificate and thus switching from HTTP and HTTPS has the following advantages:

    1. increased user confidence in your website.
    2. increased security of the website.
    3. faster loading times of the website.
    4. improvement of the ranking in search engines like Google.

    and much more…

    SOMETIMES your website has an SSL certificate, but your website is still not showing as secure. How can this happen? Check your content – probably an image or other embedded item is coming from a non-secure website. Correct that and your problem goes away.

    Your website hoster SHOULD provide an SSL certificate as a part of your hosting package. If not, you can register for a free certificate at https://letsencrypt.org/.

    How Can I Check for Broken Links on My Website?

    Don’t you just hate clicking on a link and landing on a “Page Not Found 404”? DOn’t let that happen only our own website.

    A Broken Link or Dead Link is a link that is no longer accessible and/or whose call-up displays an error message (“404 Not Found”). A broken link is important in search engine optimization. Dead links should be avoided, so regular checking is important. A broken link checker can be helpful in detecting dead links.

    Some CMS, like WordPress, offers Broken Link Checker plugins, so you don’t need to check. If you don’t have such a plugin, you can check for broken links at https://ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker

    How Can I Check for Duplicate Content or Missing Content on my Website?

    This is not always easy to do. Even Microsoft Word makes you create a Macros to check for duplicate content. If your website is many years old, it could well be that you have duplicate content on it. Why is this bad? Your website should offer unique content. Sometimes you have a duplicate sentence or part of a paragraph. This is fine. Duplicating pages or multiple paragraphs can reduce your authority.

    Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content in the same language or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. 

    Google https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/duplicate-content

    Missing Content sounds a bit odd. How can you know content is missing? Here we mean missing page titles, missing meta descriptions, missing header images, and those other parts of your website that you shouldn’t leave empty. Use all the opportunities you have to be found! Don’t leave money on the table.

    Don’t worry, you can check your content using a variety of tools:

    https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk downloadable tool you can use on your desktop free of charge to check for missing content
    https://www.copyscape.com online tool to check for duplicate content
    https://www.siteliner.com online tool to check for duplicate content

    Coming up in our next TechTalk #5!

    The Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your website has three parts – On-Page SEO (everything that happens on your pages including content, headers, images, etc.), Off-Page SEO (everything that happens away from your pages including social media, Google My Business, etc.), and Tech SEO. Tech SEO revolves around all those technical areas of your website and web hosting that can influence you are being found in Google & co. Don’t miss it!

    • + Check URL structure is SEO-friendly (SEO TechTalk #5)
    • + Check for any orphaned pages (SEO TechTalk #5)
    • + Check canonical tags (SEO TechTalk #5)
    • + Add structured data (SEO TechTalk #5)

    With thanks for the image on this post to Campaign Creators https://unsplash.com/@campaign_creators

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