Website Auditing
Published: 2021-02-14 22:48:00

## Introduction
When creating a website, it is important to make sure you create something of value. It needs to perform well, look good, and be accessible to as many people as possible. It doesn’t hurt if it is also popular and comes up as one of the top results on search engines.

In order to ensure a website is up to par, performing an audit on it can be very help. Audits evaluate the visibility of your website on a search engine based on certain criteria which may include how effective or accessible it is, how well it performs, evaluating the best practices, evaluating the SEO, and more. This is useful for creating a website that will outperform others like it.

## Web.dev and Wave
Two popular auditing websites are [Web.dev](https://web.dev/) and [Wave](https://wave.webaim.org/). Web.dev gives you scores on the Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO of a website. It allows users to input the website link, and then evaluates it. Wave goes a little more in depth, evaluating specific aspects of the webpage and giving feedback.

## Evaluating The Blue Band Webpage
Using these websites, I decided to evaluate the [Blue Band official webpage](https://blueband.psu.edu/about). The Blue Band website is a crucial tool for recruiting new members. I am aware that it is a little outdated, as the videos posted on the website were recorded at least 4 years ago. I wanted to evaluate the website to see if there was anything that could be improved upon so that the Blue Band could have the best possible web page for recruiting new members.

### What is SEO
Something I do not know much about is SEO. According to moz.com, “SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”

### Meta Description
When entering the Blue Bands website into Web.dev, it scored a fairly high SEO score (80), but still came back with some errors. The first error that was presented was that the “Document does not have a meta description”. This means that there is either no page description included, or the meta description field is left empty. This can be an issue, because having these descriptions makes the page easier to find when searching.

A way to fix this error would be adding a description. It is fairly easy to add the description to the web page using HTML. The most effective descriptions are clear, concise, and specific. Make sure that the description is unique, and try to stay away from too vague of words, for this could mark the web page as spam.

### Link Crawlability
Another SEO issue that was reported was “Links are not crawlable”. Web crawling is where automated programs called “bots” browse the web to index web pages by the content they contain. This index allows that page to be found by users. The crawlability is its accessibility according to these “bots”.

There are a few ways to improve a websites crawlability. Some of it is by fixing the web pages meta tags. There may be issues within the page that limit the bots crawling capabilities. There may be issues with Meta tags or robots.txt, Internal broken links, Server related Problems, Issues with Sitemap XML, Mistakes with Website Architecture, or Outdated technologies in Web-Design.
The issue that is most likely causing this error on the Blue Band page is that there is an internal absent link. Using the Wave audit website, I was able to see that there is an empty link present on this website which is interrupting the web crawling process. Broken or empty links waste search bots time, which will prevent it from reaching the quality and relevant pages. To fix this, remove or change the empty link from the web page.

### Target Sizing
The last SEO issue that was presented on Web.dev is “Tap targets are not sized appropriately”. According to Web.dev, tap targets are the “areas of a web page that users on touch devices can interact with. Buttons, links, and form elements all have tap targets.” Search engines rank pages based on how mobile friendly they are, so making sure tap targets are big and far enough apart is what will help pages become more mobile friendly.

In order to fix this for the Blue Band page, the icons will most likely need to be made bigger. When trying to access this page on a mobile device, it is difficult to navigate. A big popup window immediately opens, and it is difficult to hit the x to close the window on a mobile device.

[Click Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbRIqh2Shs0) to see me demonstrating how to use Web.dev and Wave.

Below are some links I used to understand what these terms mean!
[Crawlability](https://www.semrush.com/blog/crawlability-issues/)
[Targets](https://web.dev/tap-targets/)
[What is SEO](https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo)
[Meta Description](https://web.dev/meta-description/)