Many online business owners and webmasters are interested in receiving quick assessments about how they can improve their websites for SEO. There’s no way to fix a website and get a top ranking in Google in under an hour but there are several small things you can do to put your website on the path to SEO success. For smaller sites, this quick SEO assessment should only take around 20 minutes to implement.
There are several automated systems and plug-ins available out there for evaluating your website’s SEO. Nonetheless, there is simply no replacement for human assessment because of the detailed insight and depth it provides. Follow this simple checklist in order to determine what your website lacks in terms of SEO. It will be an eye-opener and allow you to quickly assess your website even before you consult an SEO professional.
1. Write the URL of your homepage with and without www, if both versions are available choose one and redirect the other using your htaccess file. This is the most common canonical mistake, and can also affect the link building strategy. Remember to change all the links to the home page to the version you choose.301 Redirect Guide.
2. Take a look at your home page title tags. Make sure that the first words are your targeted keywords. If your keywords aren't too long you can include your brand/url at the end of your title tag. Always verify that every page has a unique title tag with relevant keywords.
3. Review your website navigation. Inner linking structure is an important factor in your SEO optimization and java drop down menus, for example, are unreadable to the search engine spiders. Always try to use text for your navigation and take advantage of the CSS files for the decoration, avoid images for your navigation when possible and if you do have to use images make sure the alt tag of that image is related to the page you are linking.
4. Take a look at the URLs. Both for users and search engines your URL should include keywords and not a code. Dynamic URLs (site.com/page.php?category=2&product=54) should be converted to Static URLs(site.com/cars/honda/). URL Rewrite Guide.
5. Every page in your site should target different keywords, don't create 3 different pages targeting, for example, NY Limousine, NY City Limousine and Limousine in New York City NY, when you can easily target all 3 keywords in one page. Make sure the targeted keywords for every page are used properly in your URLs, navigation, in Title and Description tags, h1/h2/h3 tags, content and image ALT tags.
6. Take a look at your content. Is there enough text? If your content is hidden in frames, flash animations or images the search engine spiders won't be able to read it. A common and easy way to check this is opening the "source code" in your web browser, all the content should be visible in your HTML. Another simple way is to use the free spider simulator available for free online.
7. Check your meta description tags and make sure that it is unique for every page in your site, make sure you've included the most important keywords, proper length, and relevance. Your meta description should invite your potential customers to click on your search result. A well written Title and description Tag can highly increase the click through rate even if you aren't in the top 3 positions.
8. Analyze the robots.txt file. There are many available tools to make sure you aren't blocking the search engines spiders involuntarily from crawling relevant content. In the robots.txt file you can also include a link to the sitemaps of your website. Free robots.txt Test.
9. There are many free tools to generate XML and HTML sitemaps. Take advantage of them! Submit your XML sitemap to your webmaster account in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Include a link to the HTML sitemap in your index and 404 error pages for your users. HTML sitemaps shouldn't have more than 100 links per page. Remember to keep them updated. XML sitemaps generator and Wordpress HTML Sitemap Generator.
10. Check for broken links. It can happen to anybody to misspell a link. In big sites it is very common to have links to pages that expired or don't exist anymore. Broken Links Checker.
11. In big sites linking structure can be a problem. You shouldn't have more than 100 links per page, try to structure and divide the links by category. If you have more than 100 pages the relevance should flow in the site navigation. You can try to link the top sellers/highest "money makers" products in all the pages to give them more relevance but don't overdo it.
12. Ask your wife/husband, neighbor and friends to read your content. Many times people over optimize their content with too many keywords making it unnatural. Remember to keep your customer/visitors in mind before the search engines. Natural, relevant, well written content is a linkable content!
Follow these easy steps in order to give your website a basic assessment and identify any issues that your site may have with SEO. Remember that doing this analysis is just a quick way of getting started with SEO and determining whether or not your site needs to be altered. It cannot replace a thorough SEO analysis by a professional. However, you can use this checklist to spot and fix any major issues prior to hiring professional SEO services.
