If you own, manage or plan to have a website or online presence, it’s very important to plan and review the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) high-quality content without ignoring the structural architecture and developer perspective. In this article, you will find an SEO guide to properly audit and improve your ranking using a structural and developer approach to SEO.

SEO Structural Audit - Picture of code including the Title, Metatag and other relevant SEO attributes.

Here is the 2019 ultimate SEO structural / developer audit checklist.

2019 ultimate SEO structural / developer audit checklist


  1. Target keywords
  2. Cross-link relevant content
  3. Use anchor text
  4. Use breadcrumb navigation
  5. Minimize link depth
  6. Usability
  7. Accessibility/spiderability
  8. Search engine health check
  9. Keyword health checks
  10. Duplicate content checks
  11. URL check
  12. Title tag review
  13. Content review
  14. Meta tag review
  15. Sitemaps file and robots.txt file verification
  16. Redirect checks
  17. Internal linking checks
  18. Geolocation
  19. External linking
  20. Page load time
  21. Image alt tags
  22. Code quality

Target keywords

Make sure you do the proper research terms and target keywords you use, know your competition to strategically capture the most traffic. Use SEO tools such as Alexa (https://www.alexa.com/ ) or SEMrush (https://www.semrush.com/ ).

Include links to other related content. This will give you more credibility with your audience and with search engines. Use anchor text: Use same page hyperlinks to reference titles, and subtitles, and avoid using “click here” link text, be descriptive and specific (… click SEO audits to learn more.)

Use anchor text

Use same page hyperlinks to reference titles, and subtitles, and headings. Make sure you avoid using “click here” link text, be descriptive and specific (… click SEO audits to learn more.)

These style of linking helps with usability and highquality content by showing your audience and search engines the relevance and structure of your site.

Search engines use site structure to get a clue of the importance of your pages. The flatter the structure, the more important the page appears to be to search engines and your audience. Use heading tags to set the proper importance of the content.

Usability

This is implied most of the time, but the easier your site is to navigate. The better rate of conversion you will have.

Accessibility/spiderability

Make sure your site is friendly to search engines, and all audiences.

Do a search for your own domain as part of your SEO Audit like this: site:[yourdomain] and see what the search engine returns. Make sure you are seeing what you are expecting to see, if not make a list of the things you would like to see, and address them. Other things to consider here is to make sure your site is not cached with old information.

Keyword health checks

Do a search for the keywords you think you are using for your audit, and compare it against the results, to make sure you are using the right terms.

Duplicate content checks

Check that your content is not duplicated unintentionally, for example check the www, https:// vs http://. A quick an easy way to test is to search for unique content as an exact quotation wrapped in “”. Also you can search using inurl: “text” or inTitle: “text”.

URL check

Make sure your URL is short, clean, and descriptive and meaningful to your brand.

Title tag review

Make sure your title tag is unique, meaningful, short and descriptive. This is used by search engines to display in the search results as a summary of that page.

Content review

Do you have enough relevant content, make sure keywords match with header information, and content.

Meta tag review

Make sure each page has a unique metatag for description if that is not possible remove them altogether. Use Keywords metatag, but don’t abuse them, used them to match your content, otherwise try may hurt you at the end.

Sitemaps file and robots.txt file verification

Use Google webmaster tools “Test robots.txt” to verify your robots.txt file is optimized. Also, check you sitemap file to make sure it matches your all your pages.

Redirect checks

Avoid page redirects as possible, but if you must use one, make sure it returns a 301 HTTP status code.

Internal linking checks

Important Pages will include many links, make sure you don’t exceed 100 per page. Use anchor links within the page. Usually, search engines assume the subdomains are handled by a different party, so it needs to be evaluated separately.

Geolocation

Geolocation: If you are targeting a local audience, make sure your actual address is included in the content.

External linking

review your inbound links to your site from other websites, using backlinking tools such as Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org) or Majestic SEO (http://www.majesticseo.com ). Make sure your keywords are included on the hyperlinks from those external sites.

Page load time

Long loading pages, may penalize your ranking for bad experience to your users. Not to mentioned that the conversion rate will be greatly improve.

Image alt tags

Although Search engines are very advanced in analyzing images. Simplify the search engine job by explicitly telling the search engines about information about your images make sure you use: use the title attribute, alternate attribute, a descriptive file name to help them know what the images you are using are about.

Code quality

Poor code pages can have undesirable behaviors, make sure you use free tools such as SEO Browser (http://www.seo-browser.com) and Markup Validation Service from W3C (https://validator.w3.org/).

In conclusion, Hopefully, the 2019 SEO structural audit checklist I provided here will get you exposed to additional features that will make your site rank better, and be more meaningful to search engines and your audience.

Eduardo Gomez