How to keep improvements log file on the website
Principles of the making improvements log file
- Standardization. The improvements log file is a report. The SEO specialist shows his readiness and coherence by making a standardized report. We advise you to organize the structure first, and then, if necessary, modify and amend it.
- Flexibility. The point is to show the work progress or ways to improve the result so that the website is capable to sell its products. The improvements log file helps to build an individual approach to the project and show the specialist what improved the results of promotion and what didn't. Therefore, based on this you can adjust the promotion strategy.
- Specificity and conciseness. Each problem should be described briefly, and be informative as much as possible: date, problem, solution. Don't specify unnecessary information, but only what is really important. It is better not to include two errors into one sentence, but rather describe them separately, even if they seem to be similar.
- On-time performance. You should timely update information about the changes and the results of the task. If this system works for a website, the SEO specialist and programmer will be able to communicate quickly and efficiently.
The document is also helpful for providing monthly reports to the client. Usually the improvements log file is sent to the client once a month.
If more often, the specialist's work pay rate increases because he has to prepare a document every day. If less often, you risk losing communication with the client. Moreover, the report for the client is written in a simple way, because most of the terms won't be understood by the user.
SEO specialist must be consistent and sketchy. It is always best to follow this kind of structure: it will be easier for the client to find the necessary information next time.
Log file content of the website
- what was done;
- how the website performance was improved;
- what else needs to be done;
- what they tried to do but failed;
- additional recommendations and conclusion.
The first revision is carried out after the technical audit. Let's dive into more details about what changes on the website may take place.
Internal site optimization
What can SEO specialist suggest you to do:
- make a regional version of the website in a subfolder, if you need to attract users from a particular region;
- add new pages for specific requests, if, according to the analysis, they will help in the promotion;
- pages that must be present on the website: about, contacts, news; work on semantics and change the website tree.
It is very important to display each step and separate them by months in the improvements log file. For example, we make a link in Google Spreadsheets, track traffic data for the month,% changes and shortcuts for tasks that have been loaded.
Steps need to be split by type: bugs/improvements/new pages. Or changes related to the visual parts: interlinking blocks, filters; and non-visual: closed indexing. Therefore, you can see visually the change that leads to the decrease of conversion.
Semantic core and website structure
Types of search engine spam:
Detected spam is removed and is registered in the log file.
Web URLs of promoted pages
If URLs are changed, we set a redirect from old to new URL, and you should pay special attention to this.
You can also split the website into type pages. For example categories/cards, etc. And then makes notes of what happened to each of them. If there was any type of pages that were deleted, you should add this to the log file so that the next specialist doesn't repeat the error.
Tags and meta tags
- wrong query: buy, car, St. Petersburg;
- correct query: buy a car in St. Petersburg.
Recommendations for registering tags and meta tags can change, so you need to follow the SEO news to stay tuned.
The improvements log file as a product of communication helps to coordinate all changes with the developers or the customer. Otherwise, you will have unexpected errors on the website when the SEO specialist, for example, changed the URLs links to the SEO-friendly URLs that were responsible for downloading information for the Telegram bot.
Technical website optimization
At this stage, it includes several operations.
Check robots.txt file
What should you check in the file:
- Directives for search engines. There are permissive - "Allow" and prohibiting - "Disallow" directives. The "User Agent" string is important, indicating the person for whom the rules were specified.
Today SEO-specialists follow Google's requirements. If the "User Agent" is not indicated, the access of the search machines is considered to be unlimited. See Google instructions on how to create a robots.txt file.
- Sitemap is the path to the website map. Thanks to this file, the robot can quickly study the structure and resource pages in order to quickly index it.
Avoid common errors of the robots.txt file:
Sitemap Analysis
- Sitemap.xml - for search robots;
- Sitemap.html - for users.
If everything is okay with the files, the first will be able to quickly find the necessary information, while the second will have fast indexing.
The specialist includes any errors he found into the log file that need to be fixed in the future.
Internal Link Analysis
For this, the SEO specialist:
- searches for pages without textual internal links and if he finds, he does interlinking. It is harder to get the pages to the top position without them: they will not be indexed for a long time or they will constantly decline in ranking;
- checks the number of links on each page;
- analyzes anchor links. They must be unique and contain the keyword. It's not advised to use the keyword in the direct entry.
The analysis of internal links is carried out automatically through special services to speed up the work, for example Google Search Console. The analysis data is registered in the improvements log file.
Проверка страниц с ошибками 404

Analysis of page loading speed
Check cross-browser website
Analysis of the order forms
Searching duplicate pages on the website
Duplicates may be generated by the website or plug-ins. It's hard to control this process, but if you don't remove them in time, your website's ranking will decline.
Also, the SEO specialist should:
Conclusion
You can use Google Spreadsheets, Evernote or Trello to keep logs. There you can create boards and share access to them.
The parameters should be ordered by changes made and planning. All changes that the SEO-specialist plans to register by himself must be first agreed with programmers. This will avoid errors and quickly bring the website to the top position.
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