How to Maintain the Quality Of the Site For Visitors And Search Engines
Every webmaster knows that the website is a high-tech product. You should improve and update it all the time, or die trying. :) How to fix site’s flaws, enhance its position in the search results and make search engines love it, you’ll find out from this article.
How to Check Your Site’s Quality
As the website is a complicated mechanism, its quality check requires an audit of all the components. This process includes 4 stages:
- search for technical and functional failures
- content analyzing for errors
- correction of the found flaws
- checking the traffic level of the site in a month
Carry out such checks on a monthly basis. And also monitor the reaction of users and search engines.
Of course, it’s also necessary to make a redesign of your site from time to time. But it requires serious preparation: surveys among the target audience, employment of high-class specialists etc.
The design should be concise and relevant, all the client tools should be at hand. It’s also necessary to take care of responsive design for mobile devices — many users use them for browsing.
How to Find Technical Errors
We use Serpstat to carry out a comprehensive audit of the site.
To create a new project you just have to add the domain. We took amazon.com as our example.
To start the audit, click the appropriate button and adjust settings. In our example, we conduct an audit of 1,000 pages, with subdomains. Actually, it’s correct to set enough number to check every page on the site.
You should pay special attention to the number of threads for crawling.
The more you set, the faster the audits are carried out. But from the other side, the crawler will be banned in case too many streams are involved. In such situation, it is necessary to change User Agent.
After completing the audit (the bigger the domain size is, the more time it will take), we get to the Audit Summary section. Here we see information on the number of errors and see how well the domain is optimized in general (special SDO score).
Flaws are divided by level of priority. In our case, most problems are critical.
Below on this page, issues are divided by functional components of the site.
In our example, most problems are connected with meta tags, redirects, and headings. Go to these sections for more information.
There are 167 critical errors in Meta Tags. They need to be solved first.
169 errors are of middle priority, but their solving is also very important for further effective promotion strategy.
To view a page with errors, click on the title of the problem and click the More details button.
For example, if to click on this button in Duplicate Titles, we obtain the following page:
In the right upper corner, we see new errors and corrected errors. Thus, after the next audit will be possible to see which problems were solved or not.
Next, it’s time for Redirects. As we see, there are no critical problems, but it still requires attention for better performance. Push the More details button to find a full list of links to all the wrong redirects.
And now about the Headings. All flaws here are marked with the high priority level. So they need fixation immediately. Again, to find out exactly what pages are missing H1 headers, click on the drop-down list’s icon, and select the More details button.
Similarly, find and fix bugs in other sections. Visitors love the comfort and usability.
How to correct errors in the content and prepare the article for publication
Technical condition of the website is just one of the components of a quality resource. Useful and insightful content means almost everything for the site’s promotion in the search results. Moreover, not only new but old articles as well bring traffic.
It’s necessary to check the quality of the material: to find errors in the text, check the uniqueness of images and video. Again, this concerns not only the old but also new content. They also bring traffic, especially when these are unique scale publications.
Proofreading tools are an easy way to help you see and fix potential problem areas in your writing.
I like Hemingway App. It’s very easy, just copy the text from the word processor and paste it into the text editor. Hemingway App highlights common problems that can get in the way of clear writing: too long sentences, too many adverbs, too many instances of
passive voice. You can see an explanation of each error type here, it will also suggest simple words for complex ones.
What Hemingway App can’t do is, for example, punctuation check or proper use of articles. For this we use Grammarly.
Grammarly can check for contextual spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and style. It also includes Plagiarism checker that can compare your piece to online resources and let you know if there is any unoriginal content.
Grammarly, to be honest, is my personal favorite tool. It helped me so many times to detect :)
Summary
A quality site is a multifaceted concept, which consists of good SEO, modern and user-friendly design, useful content.
To be always aware opportunities for site growth, it’s necessary to carry out the comprehensive audit on a regular basis. It helps to find every error and shows how well it’s optimized in general.
Most often, website owners forget about meta tags. Even though they include large reserves for promotion–search engines use meta tags to compile snippets (text blocks that describe the theme of the site and present it in the search results).
The technical part of websites is certainly crucial. But anyway, the content itself plays the most important role. Original, useful and non-recurring material is the key to a good ranking of the site
Tools, presented in this article, are intended to save precious time on routine work.
