Checking for a website’s SEO problems can be done in around 10 minutes. However, you really have to know what you’re doing in order to accomplish this task. Here are the basics of a quick and effective SEO audit:

1. Adjust your Browser

First of all, you need to check your site for crawling errors. To do so, you need to disable JavaScript and cookies through your browser’s option settings. This will enable you to see your website the way a search engine sees it. Install UserAgentSwitcherforFirefox and change your user agent to GoogleBot 2.1 in order to view your website from Google’s point of view.

2. Evaluate your Homepage

A thorough evaluation of your homepage is critical. This gives visitors an initial impression of your site. Create a good impression and they will likely remember your site. Look at your homepage in the casual visitor’s point of view. This is more of common sense but most webmasters don’t really give importance to the design of their homepage thinking it is not really that important.

3. Global Navigation Test

Thoroughly test the global navigation of your site. Ask other people for impressions on your site’s global navigation. Remember to start by disabling JavaScript before you access your site. Chesck if all the global navigation links work correctly. Enable the JavaScript and check JavaScript and Ajax-based navigation. Take note of any errors and review links in your global navigation.

4. Review Category and Subcategory Pages

Every page on your website should have purpose. Good quality content is important in each page. Also, look closely at your design layout. Is it readable? Are there any eyesores that interfere when reading the content? Be conscious of your site’s link juice and check for hyperlinks to useless pages.

5. Check for Optimized Content

Check your title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags for images, H1 & H2 tags and flash & JavaScript. Make sure that these are in accordance to the current best practices. These might seem small and insignificant but when combined, they can have considerable effects in terms of SEO. There are several studies that are proof of the importance of these HTML elements.

6. Analyze your Site’s Off-page SEO

This will complete your audit. Try subscribing to SEOmoz’s comprehensive SEO software package. This is one of the best SEO tools you can use for analyzing your site’s off-page SEO. Remember to check for duplicate content. This is one of the most overlooked mistakes in optimization.