You probably already know that just one line of bad code can destroy your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, underscoring the fact that there are many hidden dangers that can kill an SEO campaign.  However, a thorough audit can reveal these issues and get your site back on track.

A good website audit should always include a test crawl.

Website owners can learn a lot by crawling their site and should be aware of at least three hidden dangers that can be uncovered.

1. Server Errors

Most website owners would be surprised to find that a simple test crawl can uncover hundreds, or even thousands, of server errors. If Google’s spiders are encountering these errors, you can bet that it isn’t a good thing.

2. 404s

If you’re not familiar with header response codes, a 404 is a “Page Not Found” error. When it comes to SEO, you need to track down your 404s because for every page not found, your business is losing search equity and your visitors are losing out on your message.

3. Troublesome Outbound Links

Hackers are continually trying to infiltrate web sites, CMS packages, and more, in an effort to benefit their own web sites. Believe it or not, a test crawl of your website might very well find links on your site that you didn’t even know about.

Running a test a crawl on a regular basis is a good idea.  There are several actionable findings that audit tools can uncover.  Finding these simple, yet destructive problems can help improve the SEO health of your web site – and that’s the ultimate goal of an SEO Audit.

The beauty of having a business blog associated with your website is that it can rank in the search engines right along with your company’s main website and social profiles. In fact, individual blog posts can rank extremely well for long-tail keywords, if set up properly. Your business blog, when combined with all of your company’s other online real estate, will help build your brand.

In order to make this a reality, of course, your entire business blog, as well as every post, needs to be properly optimized the same way every page of your website is optimized.

Here are three ways to make your business blog more search engine friendly:

1. Optimize each and every post. It is important to make sure that your blog posts rank well for related searches. In order for it to rank well, each individual blog post needs to be optimized the same way you would each page of your company’s website.

Try writing your post first and then revisit it to see if you can naturally fit more targeted keywords into the content. In addition to making sure there are keywords in the body of the post, you should also try to work keywords into the URL structure and H1 or H2 tags.

The key to optimizing your blog posts is to make sure that they read naturally. If a keyword doesn’t sound right in a particular sentence, don’t force it. There is nothing more annoying to readers than content that is “stuffed” with keywords. Without readers, your rank means nothing.

1. 2. Link related posts and pages. Once a reader has made it to your blog, the idea is to keep them around for as long as possible. One way to do so is to create an easy-to-follow linking structure. This will help you to link posts together and also link them to other relevant pages that you own and provide the reader with more in-depth information.

With a good internal linking structure you can show your audience that you are an industry expert, encouraging them to delve deeper into your blog. Links are a great way to drive blog traffic to your website, but don’t incorporate too many links. A few useful links are enough to keep users interested without overwhelming them.

1. Use unique Meta descriptions. Many website owners don’t take advantage of Meta descriptions. Although they are not as important to search engines as they once were, that doesn’t mean they can’t help.

Meta descriptions are actually like little advertisements in the search engine results pages. Use 150 characters to help convince a searcher to choose your blog post over every other listing.

After you write your blog post, come up with a quick optimized meta description that will help that post stand out.

When it comes to small business websites, web copy should be influenced but not led by SEO keywords.

As part of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, targeted keywords need to be incorporated into the copy on respective landing pages. This will help the major search engines distinguish the unique relevance between each page. However, if the web page copy doesn’t make sense, grammatically, prospective clients will go elsewhere.

SEO is vital to any online marketing strategy and is typically a website’s main source of lead generation. While there are many tactics involved in a running a successful SEO campaign, such as incorporating keywords into URLs, headers and meta information, one of the most important tactics is integrating targeted keywords into the site’s copy without sacrificing key messages and grammar.

Re-writing website copy can be the most complicated step in an SEO campaign. Keywords should be used throughout the copy, using the appropriate density, but without harm to the copy’s message. The final copy should make sense because if it doesn’t, even a strong search engine position will be worthless.

SEO campaigns need both time and investment to be successful, but the return on investment can be huge. By not taking the extra time to ensure that keywords are being used properly, you will be setting yourself up for failure.