A DIY SEO Analysis Checklist
Most people that use the internet to promote their business or even just to keep a blog are aware of the need to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to compete for a good place in the search engine results pages (SERPs). One way to find out if it is working is to do an SEO analysis of your website to take a look at its progress. While a deep SEO analysis really requires a few diagnostic tools that most webmasters probably don’t have access to, or know how to use, there are a few simple steps that you can take from any computer to check on the SEO health of your website.
Step 1: Look at your web pages and read through the content to make sure that it actually says what you want it to about your business. It is easy when you are first building a website to overlook small errors or forget to go back and fix typos and misstatements, but in the long run, if they are affecting your page’s readability they will be affecting the SEO as well. More technically, look at the keywords that have been used to tag the pages and make sure that they really match the content. Keywords should be used pretty evenly through the entire written content on a page to show the real depth of the material to the crawlers, so if yours are only appearing in the title or the top of the post you may consider a rewrite.
If your post has images, make sure that they are tagged with the keywords of the page that they appear on and have appropriate titles and Alt text attached, so that the crawlers will know what they are about. It is also important to make sure that you have plenty of internal links in your site so that the crawlers will index them as deeply as possible. At the same time, check that all of the links out of the site work, and that the pages that they lead to still exist.
Step 2: Search for yourself in all of the major search engines. Google, Bing and Yahoo share 95% of the search engine market online1 so look in those three at the very least. When you looked at the content of your page you will have assembled a list of keywords that you are using, and you should search these terms as well to see where you place in the SERPs for them. It is also useful to look at how your individual pages rank within your own site, and if you type site: www.yoursite.com into the Google search window it will list the pages on your site in order of ranking.
Step 3: Go to Google’s Page Rank Checker and see what your score out of ten is. Even if your homepage ranks well look at the ranking of any pages that are featured on your site to see what their rank is, as it may be well lower.
Step 4: If some of your pages aren’t ranking as highly as you would expect, then maybe it is suffering from a duplicate content penalty and it may be worthwhile going to Copyscape to check whether your content is closely matched somewhere else on the web.
Step 5: Take a good look at your SEO strategy and see if your methods are actually still best practice optimization. Google changes its algorithm hundreds of times a year and things that were once white hat SEO are now in a grey area and may be affecting your ranking. If you find that it is all too technical InfintechDesigns.com can do a deep SEO analysis of your website to make sure that you get the best out of your online presence.
References:
1.http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/2/comScore_Releases_January_2012_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
