This article was written by:
Afrasiab Ahmed, SEO writer.
Checking the SEO rankings of your website is very important in ranking well in Google SERP results. Additionally, sustaining your SEO rankings helps continually improve your rankings. Sites that neglect the results of SEO audits will fail to implement best practices and face diminished rankings in Google search results.
Hence, it’s important to regularly check your website health and available free SEO reports to maintain and ultimately grow your site rankings. As a result, site owners and marketing teams typically regret decision to avoid taking SEO analysis seriously as their sites drop in Google rankings due to increased competition and failing to follow proper policies.
Why conduct SEO audits?
SEO audits gives you a detailed analysis of how your website performs in search engines. For example, the SEO audit highlights the aspects of your site that search engines like, along with aspects of the site that do not meet best practices. Finally, SEO audits allow team to see areas of the site that were neglected and do not have any SEO benefits.
Developing and building a new website takes significant time and money, so watching your site fail to produce due to lack of SEO efforts can be really heartbreaking and should be avoided. It also helps avoid Google penalties, while allowing companies to set internal goals and grow your audience. SEO audits help identify areas to improve the SEO foundation of your site.
Now that we understand the importance of SEO audits and its value in maintaining a solid SEO foundation, let’s check some techniques and websites that offer free SEO tools and provide in-depth reports of you site. These SEO tools will not only tell you about flaws on your site, but also provide tips on how to correct them.
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Check Meta Tags
Meta tags provide search engines with a description of each page on a website. Search engines need context to understand the content on a page. Therefore, meta tags, such as headers, title tags and the meta description provide context. Then, search engines determine if a page or site offers relevant content for specific search queries. As a result, the placement of meta tags remains very important for rankings and generating organic traffic.
How do search engines understand page content? First, search engines crawl sites looking for the meta tags of pages, like blog posts, and then index them. The meta tags that are SEO optimized rank better in search engines (like Google) vs page with non-SEO optimized meta tags. The meta tags that contain the primary keyword and secondary keyword rank higher than other meta tags because it increases the relevancy of the post and Google loves to provide relevant and authentic information.
A good meta description also helps readers know about page content and helps them determine if they want to consume the content. For example, well written (and persuasive) meta descriptions can attract more audience and increase CTR (click-thru-rate). Importantly, these are other metrics that Google loves to help improve and maintain rankings, which ultimately helps drive more organic traffic.
Finally, many free SEO tools help site operators learn about their meta tags and descriptions. Additionally, it is also important to include unique and original meta descriptions on each page. For instance, copied meta descriptions can hurt Google rankings because Google hates duplicate content, which hurts the site or page rankings.
If a user is searching for something and happens to get result with the same meta descriptions, it creates confusion and damages the experience. Fortunately, there are free SEO tools that help analyze meta tags.
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Check ALT Text
Online SEO tools also help site owners learn about ALT text, which helps search engines understand the context of an image on a page. The ALT text also helps to increase the relevancy of the content. As a result, ALT text helps web crawlers perceive the purpose of a picture because ALT text is the language of the image. Plus, Google ranks images in search results! So, adding ALT text provides another method of generating organic traffic.
Placing the ALT text in the image is simple and can be easy. Websites built on WordPress and blogger provide easy UI to add ALT text to images.
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Check for Content Duplication
As noted above, content that is duplicated is a great threat to website rankings and should be removed. Fortunately, there are SEO tools that help identify duplicate content on sites. For example, Prepostseo’s plagiarism checker checks content duplication in your content and helps remove the content duplication with ease. Duplicate content (potentially viewed as plagiarism) shouldn’t be more than 10%. Sites with more than 10% plagiarism reach the dangerous level for penalties. These sites risk losing SERP rankings, but also domain authority and page authority.
However, tools like Prepostseo’s plagiarism checker allow content creators to review duplicate content levels. For example, simply paste the content in the box of this plagiarism checker tool. The tool scans the content and provides a full report. The website is free to use and you will get a free report from it.
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Check Backlinks
Checking backlinks can assist you with knowing where you are getting reference links. Sites that have backlinks from good authority reference sites are typically very favorable for high Google rankings. For example, SEO tools like Ubersuggest can give you a free backlink analysis of your site. As a reminder, backlinks are “do-follow” links and can be really helpful for websites. These links offer a reference link in the mind of Google to your site. Additionally, backlink analysis can also be used to check the backlink of competitors. It helps to know where competitors receive backlinks and by knowing their backlinks, SEO operators can attempt to generate the same backlinks to their own site.
Final Thoughts on SEO Tools
These websites and SEO tools offer terrific audit tips that are very helpful to generating better Google rankings. These tips follow best practices that will help your website rank higher in search engines. Plus, these SEO tools websites are free to use!
Afrasiab Ahmad writes SEO articles for online business marketers and SEO tools users to make their Google rankings surge. He contributes articles about digital marketing, SEO techniques, and tech regularly to Prepostseo.com.