Give a site an SEO Analysis

 and seo audit

by Mina Adly younan
Before we start let me ask you a question: Are we supposed to implement SEO techniques before or after we construct our website? 

The answer is definitely BEFORE as you should put in your mind when you are having your website created, the whole experience your users will have. You should ask yourselves many questions like does my site looks as professional as my business or it will give my clients the impression that I am an amateur? Is it user-friendly in terms of usability and ease of navigation? Because if it turned out to be unprofessional or difficult to be comprehended, then you will need to reconstruct it.

But, if you find it as professional as you want with usability taken into consideration but not appealing to the SERPs (Search Engines Result Pages) or its PR (Page Rank) is low then you do not need to tear it down and reconstruct it. You will just make the Search Engines like it more.

So, if you only put your brand image and your audience in mind but forgot to put the search engines, here is how you can fix that mistake and make everybody happy.

If you want to analyze a website form an SEO perspective you will need to play with these tools:

• 1-      Firebug, a Firefox add-on that helps you look at the HTML code underlying a web page, so you can see exactly how specific components were created. You can even edit the page. You're not changing the original page of course; just modifying that was loaded into your browser, so you can see what a change would look like. Try to download the latest version as the old ones were bugged.
• 2-      Google AdWords Keywords tool for analyzing keywords.
• 3-      XML-sitemaps.com
• 4-       Yahoo! Site Explorer Service: link-analysis services
• 5-      Majestic SEO: more sophisticated link analysis tool 
• 6-      Google Toolbar.
• 7-      SEOquake toolbar.  

First, to know if your site is indexed in the search engines yet, go to Google and search by typing the words 'site:' and then your site's domain name. The results will show the number of pages appear on the SERP. This can give you a good start as you can put a goal to increase this number after making your site more SEO friendly. You can use the same method in both Bing and yahoo but not in the search box of yahoo.com. It will work on the Yahoo site explorer page. 

Second, have a look on your title tag and the description tag under it. Then ask yourself: is this what I want my clients to read? Does it satisfy my whole message I need to convey? Because f not you will have to change this description to what really comforts you. If it is OK, You can go on 

Third, click on the “cashed” link so you can see a copy of what the page looked like the last time                Google crawled the page. 

Note: There is a slight chance that you may not find your site in any of the search results that could be a problem with your robots.txt file which could stop your site from being indexed. 

The fourth test is Keywords analysis. Start by brainstorming and writing down a list of all relevant keywords. Look at your competitors or people in the same business’ websites. Look at their source code (especially the keywords Meta tag).  

5- Now, use the Keywords tools for more ideas. There are many useful and important tools: Google Adwords Keyword tool, Wordtracker.com, keywordspy.com, keyworddiscovery.com, and keycompete.com. 

6- Try to type these keywords and see what results the SERP will show you. Try different search engines and domains (for instance use google.com and google.ca if your business in Canada). You can also add the location to the keyword (delivery pizza Montreal). Then ask yourself these questions: Does your site appear on the first page? Who are the competitors for such KWs? Are there relevant results that give a bad image to your website? (Like a bad review) Do people search for Keywords that you consider negative keywords? (like an online university that does not like using the term online degree and ignoring that most of relevant inquiries are online degrees). 

7- Let’s go back to the site itself and search for all content that is not Search Engine readable; like images, videos, flash files, audio files, pdfs, etc. Make sure that all the written content is in text format especially the headers and titles. For other non-text content, go check their attributes on the source code are they functional? (image alt, img src, file name, directory name. do they all have the relevant keywords or not? 

8- Make an inventory of all the content that could reach the SERP but are orphaned (does not relate to your website) such as PDFs, Flash SWF files, Pop-ups, or iFrames. See if you can use this content in an SEO friendly HTML file but if this is not possible and you feel that you still need these kind of files within your pages you can add some navigation options to them. Or you could use your robots.txt file to block that area

User-agent: *
Disallow: /popups/
Disallow:/ iframes/

9-   Check your URLs: make sure the directory and the folders and subfolders under it are rich with the relevant keywords. Also, make sure that you differentiate between the files names and the directory name by proper use of extensions (.html, or aspx, etc.) to help search engines understand the structure of your website. Also make sure that you are using dashes not underscores for the spaces, and the url is read easily by capitalizing the first word (title case). Also do not use database generated complicated urls for your dynamic website, Tell your developer to change it for you or simply use something called “mod_rewrite” (just search it or search “URL rewrite” ).  Keep your directory structure as simple as possible. Don't go down 15 levels. Keep it to two or three at the most, and use keywords instead of generic directory terms. Use “2012-Fiction-Books-store” instead of “store”. 

10- make sure that the redirect 301 directs to your main domain to help search engines understand that you only have one web site at your domain name.  

11- Title tags: Make sure that you are not using the same title tag on every page in your site, your company name perhaps, as many web developers do. Each one should be different and should contain keywords related to the specific page. Those keywords should be in the page content, too. The search engines only display a single link line for a search result entry. So if your title tag is longer than around 60 to 70 characters, including spaces, the search engine truncates the text and adds these little ellipsis dots.

12- Are the words at the beginning of your title tag just your company name or relevant keywords? Search engines give a better ranking for keywords at the beginning or top, of the component more than words at the end, or bottom; An SEO term known as “prominence”. So if you are an SEO company named “Pyramids SEO”, it is better write the title tag something like “SEO SEM affiliate marketing solutions – Pyramids SEO” because the competition is higher for the “seo solutions” than on “pyramids seo”.  You can even eliminate the company name for all the internal pages or even add it in the description tag or Keywords tag, if you need more space for your products description using keywords your customers might use even if they are codes like “Dart 7” for instance for a Nike sneakers. And Do not bother yourself about grammar because both Google and people scan do not read. 

13- Description tags do not help much in increasing the PR as Google says but it is very important as your image at the SERP. Treat the description tag in terms answering this question: what are the benefits of visiting this website?  Is there a  call to action message? Not more than 130-135 characters? Relevant text and keywords? Title-cased text? Throw away words that do not say anything (even if the sentence will be ungrammatical). Capitalized USP (unique selling points) like FREE-SHIPPING. 

14- Keywords meta tag: is not important so do not waste a lot of time on it as search engines just ignore them. 

15- Clean uncluttered source code for CSS, JavaScript, and image maps to speed the page loading time

16- Rich snippet data helps your listing stands out (helpful if your website is about applications, recipes, games, store,  etc.) make sure you have classes for all possible ranking or listing elements (duration, ingredients, author, operating system, size, price, etc.). You can use schema.org, or Google’s webmaster Rich Snippets, or microformats.org to help you tag all the relevant data to help google grab all the information,

You can start analyzing your website (or any website) using the Google’s testing tool: Rich Snippets Testing Tool (you can find it on: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets)

17- JavaScript navigation structure is not read by search engines

18- Submission of a sitemap (HTML and XML for basic web pages, images, videos, news) and if they are added to the robots.txt file 

19- Navigation internal links at the bottom of all pages (but do not over use it)

20- The use of anchor text for inner links instead of generic words

21- If you are having a local business make sure that Google knows your location and connects it to your website. Do you have a geo-targeting Meta tag? If not it is simple just use any geotag generators and you'll find services such as geo-tag.de/generator/en.html. And make sure you put your address into every page in your site, including the zip code. A good place to put the address is in the footer of every page, but you should also have the address high up on top of the page somewhere, too, maybe even in the header, in readable text of course--not just an image--or in an h1 tag. You'll also want to have a Contact us or location page for each of your locations. If you have five different locations, create five different pages, and get the address information, along with the type of business, into all the important areas: the title tag, an h1 tag, even the URL. Make sure you include keywords related to your business on the Contact us page. Many companies have pages with keywords but without location information, then pages with location information but without keywords. You need to combine both on the same pages.

22- Is the site user-friendly in terms of readability and usability and attractiveness? Is it trustworthy? Are there excessive amounts of ads or irrelevant content above-the-fold? These are questions that Google SEO Panda updates ask,

23- For better PR, you need to have a quality links that are directing to you. To do the link analysis you could use yahoo’s search box and type: linkdomain: yoursite.com > show inlinks > except from this domain or you can use another tool : www.majesticseo.com . If you do not have links, start to build them. Write articles on Examiner.com or Suite101.com, reviews, blogs, forums, or even tell your friends or coworkers who have their own pages to link to your site. 

24- Local indexing/ local search submissions on www.google.com/places, www.bing.com/businessportal, http://listings.local.yahoo.com, www.ubl.org  Make sure that the information on the directories are the same as on your site. Add as many images and videos as possible. And of course your keywords. 

seo analysis and seo audit