SEO Audits – What Are the First Things You Review?

Ben Lloyd

SEMpdx needs to put together a list of the “Top SEO factors” for our Hot Seat events. We’re going to present the list and a brief explanation of each item as part of the opening spiel for each Hot Seat event. While we COULD cover a lot – time constraints require that we keep this portion of the event to 5 or 10 minutes. So – I’m shooting for a list of the 5 most important things to know about with respect to SEO.

While all of us at SEMpdx have our own lists – I feel that we need a list that’s built using more ‘democratic’ means. So here’s the question then: “What are the first things you look at when doing an SEO review of a site? Why?”

Please contribute your thoughts via ‘comments’ below. I’ll summarize & tally the comments, and update this post with the winning list! Here’s a starting point:

  • Keywords in Title Tags
  • Text Page Headlines (using header tags)
  • Keyword Use in Unique Text Body Copy
  • Internal Link Anchor Text
  • URLs
  • META Description
  • Inbound Links
  • HTML Site Map
  • META Keywords
  • Robots.txt
  • XML Sitemap file
  • Alt Tags
  • W3C Validation

Which 5 do you think are the most important? What did I miss?

(BTW – approved comments are ‘followed’, so you’ll get the link credit for your contribution).

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    3 Responses to “SEO Audits – What Are the First Things You Review?”

    1. Jean-Pierre says:

      1. KW in Title
      2. Content
      3. Inbound Links
      4. Description
      5. Sitemap

      Everything else is important as well, but the loudest signal is the inbound links.

    2. Ben says:

      thanks for your feedback!

    3. Glenn Abel says:

      1. Title bars
      2. Text/heds high on page
      3. Keywords in page headlines/permalinks
      4. Inbound links
      5. Internal linking

      I almost always find important text/heads in image files; site owners unaware of this problem.

      basically your top 5 works for me …

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