Part 5: Analysing Backlinks
Backlinks are the number of websites which have decided that your content is informative and well written enough for them to provide a link into it for their readers to follow. Establishing a large number of high quality backlinks suggests to search engines that your content is highly respected and worth visiting.
However, too many bad quality backlinks look like an attempt to manipulate SEO rankings and your site will be penalised as a result. You need to find out as much information as you can about your backlinks and can use a number of tools to achieve the required information:
Using the data about backlinks into your website you can assess the quality of the sites linking into you.
Is each link from a single root domain?: A quality link is one which is from a single website with a single root domain. Multiple links from a single root domain have less impact than links from multiple root domains.
Are the links nofollowed?: The most effective links are not nofollowed, but for all of your links to be followed looks unrealistic and like suspicious behaviour.
Is the link text individual?: If the link text attributed to your links is identical on every link, it looks unnatural and could be flagged as spam.
Do your backlinks come from pages with related content?: Links should come from websites that offer a similar content subject matter or the link looks irrelevant to your site.
Are the websites that link into your content of high quality?: The quality of the websites linking into you will determine the quality of your website. Too many low quality websites providing backlinks makes your website look low quality.
Social Network Relevance
The social relevence of your website is determined by how popular your content becomes across the social media networks. The social currency of each meadia offers data on how popular your website is. Facebook uses Likes, Twitter uses Retweets and Google + uses +1s to calculate the popularity of your content.
Social currency should be from respected networkers to establish the quality of your popularity. You can get more information about the social respectability of your website by using services such as Shared Count.
Sizing up the Competition
Addressing SEO issues and improvements on your website provide an essential audit to keep your ranking performance healthy and up to date. One further consideration is the quality of SEO which your competition is undertaking.
All of the techniques which you use to analyse your own website SEO capabilities should be applied to other websites which provide similar services or products as yourself, A competitive audit will help you to identify weaknesses in their strategy and compensate for areas where they are strong whist exploiting areas where they are weak within your own marketing strategy.
Writing your SEO Audit Report
Your SEO audit report will offer details about what you have discovered during your website analysis and offer solutions to overcome any problems which you have identified.
When writing your audit report, you need to ensure that the reader is able to easily follow your analysis and recommendations. You should avoid technical jargon and have an idea of the audience who may be trying to make use of your report which includes marketers, designers, executives, administration and managers who may not be particularly tech savvy.
Identify a list of priorities which need immediate action and allow less significant issues to be addressed at a later date.
Your solutions need to be specific to their website offering a step by step approach to updating areas of the website which will have a positive impact.