How do I know if I’m doing SEO right? Sure, I know the rules, but am I really practicing what I preach?
After attending the Monday’s Raleigh SEO Meetup on How to Audit Your Site for SEO, I returned home with the motivation to finally kick the tires of JillianWarren.com’s SEO strategy and see how it’s working. I always update this site with SEO best practices in mind, but (as it’s a personal side project and not my actual work), I’m not always as diligent as I could be, usually in the interest of saving time.
With my SEO vigor renewed, I set out to accomplish Day 1 of Phil Buckley‘s SEO site audit workbook. (It also helps that I spent the rest of the week at home sick, so I had extra free time to devote to the project!)
Day 1
- Test my domain at urianalysis.com to confirm that all instances of my domain name (http://www.jillianwarren.com, jillianwarren.com, etc.) all resolve one single canonical page. I added a few basic 301 redirects for different possible versions of my homepage URL that users might type into their browsers, just in case.
- Spider my site (I used Screaming Frog) for an inventory of all links to check for 404s, missing meta data, and complicated strings of redirects. I realized I haven’t always been diligent about creating unique page titles and meta descriptions for every tiny piece of content, so I spent plenty of time adding those. Plus, I found and fixed an internal link spelling error and a few external links to pages that had since changed URLs.
- Check Google Webmaster Tools, particularly the new Site Health feature, to confirm Google is able to properly access my site. No problems there!
- Test my site at ReverseInternet.com. For a site like mine, this really didn’t come in handy, especially since I didn’t want to sign up for an account.
Day 1: complete! I’m always invigorated by attending industry events like the Raleigh SEO Meetup, but then other priorities compete for my energy and I fail to follow through on all the ideas and tips I accumulate. I hope to stick with this one and put all 7 days of the SEO Audit plan into practice.
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