My last post commented on how no posts had been added to the blog since 2015, now I want talk about other issues within.
When you leave a website for several years and you then decide to check through the technical aspects of the site to see if it is up to date with the latest optimization techniques, maybe you shouldn’t be surprised if things have moved on and updates are required.
But in the case of this site yes fokm.co.uk, I have to say the changes needed, seen through this Mini Audit are almost embarrassing.
I have never claimed my site was well designed or ticked all the boxes, but I would be lying if I wasn’t surprised by how bad it really was, in terms of helping Google understand what this site was about.
Lets Start With The WordPress Based Blog
It is no longer a good idea, to have the same title, same H1, same description and same URL. But that is what WordPress will give you as default. The way to personalise this process is to use an “add on” such as Yoast, which is installed into WordPress admin and you can change these options.
To be fair 4 or 5 years ago, Yoast did not give as many options as now and sometimes other “add ons” needed to be added to achieve the same result. And maybe having different versions of a H1, title was not so important, but I know it was process that was coming into force and so I am so surprised it was never implemented.
To make things worse the main title of the blog. “F.O.K.M News and Blog” was the H1 title of very post, leaving the actual post title as a H2. This is shockingly bad, for someone who states he knows SEO, i.e. ME! I have no idea how this was missed, even 4 or 5 years ago.
Staying on the subject of H1 tags, looking through the main site, I discovered the logo surrounded by H1s? Are you kidding me? How embarrassing. Did this site really belong to me?
Something that has changed over the years is the use of category pages, which are then noindex followed. This is a good process to avoid duplicate content and again, Yoast allows you to do that.
But I have found the internal links from a noindex page to be very weak, so prefer to have all posts listed on the blog homepage and thorough internal linking from within each posts content to be more effective.
There is a total lack of images also. Images are good for sharing on social media and often improve retention times. Seems Photoshop didn’t exist back them, or was just too lazy to create of locate a free licensed one. In fact I am still not adding any image to this post, if you think I am sharing this think again.
So another time filler for Google, a bit more freshness a few more words you get the picture, when the full audit is finished. I will plan some quality content, which will take the site further.