Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves modifying a website to be “search engine friendly” so it will rank higher in the search engines. Your company’s presence on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing are important in gaining an online presence and online business.

We all know that when consumers look for a product or service, they turn to search engines for answers. In fact, hundreds of millions of search queries are run on search engines every day.

More now then ever businesses are relying on the Internet to get business and are having SEO audits done of there web sites.  But Search Engine Optimization is more then just web site setup and structure.  There are a lot of other variables that search engines take into consideration.  These things get over looked in Search Engine Optimization audits.  Let’s take a look at what they are

1. Google & Bing Webmasters Account Setup

This is so important for testing the way the major search engines are crawling your site.  This is a HUGE piece when understanding why robots.txt is acting the way it is and why your site map is not showing the correct amount of pages.

You can specify and add pages that are not being indexed by the crawlers and you can link this account with Google Analytics to see what queries and keywords are ranking the best and where you can improve.

2. Website Analytics

This information is SO important for more reasons then I can list.  But the basic reason is one linking this information with Webmaster tools is valuable and SEO effective.  Analytics in it self holds a lot of search engine weight and has been proven then sites with Google Analytics account rank higher then others.

3. Back Linking

Back Links, Back Links and more Back Links.  Search Engine crawlers love back links.  Back Links tell the search engines two thinks you have inbound links which help your ranking and helps them determine link popularity which is important the more popular a link is and the more back links to a page the higher you rank.

4. Meta Description

A lot of SEO people and myself are going to tell you Meta data does little to nothing for SEO anymore.  People will tell you don’t obsess with your Meta description its not helping your page rank.

I believe this is something that is HUGELY disregarded in SEO audits.  I don’t care if you are ranked number #1 by Google or Bing if your Meta Description is not attractive customers are going to click on the #2 ranked site.  I see so many #1 ranked pages with no description.

That’s like the old med for “Bring the horse to water but you can’t make it drink”

Your number one for that query but there is no an core to make them click threw.

Over all I think SEO audits are a good thing, are important and money well spent.  I would love to work with anyone who reads this to help them with there Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work.  But even if you are doing it yourself or having another company do it for you 🙁 please make sure they don’t over look the little things that can help you go from the bottom to the top on any search engine.