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09.02.09 Using Website Audits Can Provide Better Ranking Focus  By Barry WelfordIn the past I have expressed some skepticism about the free website reviews that are available. Another aspect of this topic came to mind when I took part in a website audit online chat hosted by David Harry via his Huomah SEO Blog. I suddenly realized that there is a world of difference between the words review and audit. What is a review? Most often the word review is used about art objects, like a play or a book. It is usually one person's opinion and clearly it is always subjective. If you want a review of your website, it could be triggered by a simple question like, What do you think of my website? The word review almost emphasizes that this should deal with how the website looks to the reviewer. If you regard your website as a work of art, then such a review may be all that you are looking for. Grading Websites Many website owners need more. They build their websites to achieve certain goals. A review that indicates that the reviewer found the website attractive is not very helpful in measuring performance against goals. Some people have therefore attempted to put some precision in this process by offering grades for websites.  For example Website Grader does attempt to measure how well a given site will appear in the search engine listings. This particular blog seems to be rated quite highly by such a tool. However the method of computing the score can be somewhat arbitrary and certainly Michael Gray has some major reservations about this process. In addition it is not clear that such a grading tool will give the right list of actionable items to help improve the website.
What is an audit? The word audit would seem to be a much better choice for a tool that can help point to ways of improving the website. An audit is a disciplined monitoring process to identify how well a website is performing on the important factors involved in achieving the website's objectives. A good audit will cover all the important parameters of the website and provide measurements of the website's position. This allows a detailed list to be prepared of what actions are needed for full performance improvement. The hard-nosed audit process is much more likely to be useful than the somewhat soft and fuzzy review. SMM offers Website Mini-Audits A full website audit can be extremely detailed and take a significant amount of time to complete. However in some cases a more summary mini-audit may quickly identify important major factors that need correction. It is for this reason that SMM offers a range of mini-audits to check out major problems when only limited budgets are available. If you are concerned about your website and whether it is performing as well as it might, why not get in touch with us for which ever mini-audit will work for you. Comments About the Author: Barry Welford, President of SMM Internet Marketing Consultants works with business owners and senior management on Internet Marketing strategy and action plans to grow their companies. He is a moderator at the Cre8asite Forums and writes on Business and the Internet in four blogs, Senior Money Memos, BPWrap, StayGoLinks and The Other Bloke's Blog. |
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