A diagnostic SEO assessment is the complete troubleshooting of the data of your website .The most important thing is to get a complete picture of how the engines are crawling and indexing your website. Summarize all the keywords and their impact on the search engines, use tools to check the inflow of traffic. In short identify completely the weaknesses and strengths of your website. This troubleshooting is must before kick starting the action. By action here I mean extensive SEO implementation and major site redesign. SEO diagnostic audit is all about gathering the maximum relevant data on your website and analyzing it before the SEO team gets into action.

Let’s summarize the major components that come under SEO diagnostic audit.

On-Page Factors

• The website domain should be analyzed in terms of title, Meta tags, code weight and placement. The sections and categories should be scanned to check whether they are related properly to the interior pages.
• The ranking for specific keywords and its relevance to content of the associated page should be summarized.

Off-Page Factors

• The link building of your website should be analyzed here in terms of the quantity and quality of links going in and out of your website. A procedure for thematic link building should be set in.
• The social media impact on your account should be tracked and steps should be used to enhance it in your favor.
• The data of impact of links on the Page Rank should be provided to the SEO team.

Site-Wide elements

• The site architecture and navigation should be checked. The pages should be scanned to take note whether there is any duplicate content issue.
• The dynamic URLs linking the interior pages of website should be found and instructions should be given to make them either user friendly or into static URLs.
• Site latency should be checked to help in keyword analysis.

Link Building forms an integral part of search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Link building is a process in which the campaigner tries to get bulk quantity of good quality inbound links to his website. When two equally competent search engine friendly websites compete for a slot, the efforts taken on quality link building come into picture.

Thematic link building can be termed as a process through which links are obtained from the sites that are relevant to the theme of our website. A few links from the sites that are relevant to our website content are of more importance and worth than hundreds of links from completely irrelevant sites. Thematic link building is quality link building which the search engine crawlers are interested in. Thematic link building is a slow process and requires quite a bit patience, skill and research.

SEO Friendly Thematic Link Building

• The objective, theme and content of the website for which link building is to be done should be analyzed and understood clearly. The concept of thematic link building depends on this.

• The keywords related to the website’s content and theme should be tabulated and studied. Using the keywords one by one, sites related to our website should be grabbed for further action. The other way is to use the “related” command and search for sites that thrive on the same theme as of our parent website. Direct competitor websites should be kept aside for time being.

• The next step is to find ways to induce the link of your website into the domain of shortlisted websites. This could be done by adding a link on their resource page or posting an article and getting a link from there or posting a comment with a link on their website. The websites should be thoroughly studied and the best possible way out of the 3 should be found out.

• A customized email should be sent to the webmaster and a request for adding a link should be placed if any of the 3 ways mentioned above are not available. Follow the reference to the original contact maximum for 3 or 4 times. If you do not get a reply dump that website and move on to other. No reply means the person the other side is not interested.

• When it comes to direct business competitors, be a little cautious. Visit site explorer sites and enter the domains one by one. The access to the external links to the shortlisted website can be gained by going to “inlinks” tab and then the option of “Entire Website” and “Except from this domain”.

Thematic link building done with the above approach can help you optimize your website in a better way. Remember the search engine crawler algorithms give importance to quality links thematically linked to your website rather than hundreds of irrelevant links.

A search engine friendly CMS has to inculcate the simplicity and management of a CMS and the website optimization advantages of SEO. A CMS atleast should not create content, dynamic URLs and queries that the search engine crawlers prefer to give a slip. The system should let the user create customized Meta tags and use them according to page relevance, static URLs and titles to help the optimization of site.

Some systems allow the user to optimize the content live from URL on the web. The SEO compatible CMS should allow the user to optimize the content as they create it. The CMS should have inbuilt SEO tools to let the user create and optimize content then and there. For this the CMS should allow users to easily use keyword rich static URLs, title tags, customized Meta tags and image alt text.

A few tips to help CMS lure search engines!

Link Quality Not Quantity That Matters

Try to optimize your CMS to link highly trafficked sites to your website. More the quality inbound links, more the search engine will be interested in your website.

Meta Elements

It is important to use Meta descriptions and keywords in relevance to your site to pull in the crawlers. Now days search engines do not give that much importance to these but it is better your CMS lets you customize these at ease.

Say No To Dynamic URLs

The number of dynamic pages a search engine can index are limited. If at all you use dynamic pages make sure that not every search engine crawl the dynamic and static page. A Dynamic URL like “http://www.yourseite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234″ might be skipped by a search engine crawler as too many parameters included might clash with webmaster parameters. Inbound links tend to be less on dynamic URLs as any user prefers static URLs as they are easily understandable.

Alt Text

Alternative text must be added to all images other than the purely visual ones. Using targeted keywords inside ALT text and TITLE text parameters in your IMG tags is a widely recognized SEO best practice for increasing page/link relevancy. Plus, it’s a great way to improve usability for the visually impaired

Get JavaScript’s In External Files

This helps in better management of documents and the page weight gets reduced. The search engines generally do not desire tons of data before actual content. Placing JavaScript’s in external files takes care of this problem.

Headers And Emphasis On Keywords

Use headers for important text with regard to meaning to increase the relevancy. Single out those keywords only which reflect the content rather than complete inline font sizing.

Free CSS

A SEO compatible CMS should give a free hand to CSS. IT should allow the use of CSS without restrictions on design or layout.

Negative Values Concern

A very useful CSS technique but spam alerts to the search engines can be caused due to negative values. The problem here in terms of progressive design has to do with image replacement and the SEO concern somewhat conflict here.