October 9, 2013
SEO Website Evaluation
How do you know if you need to have your website optimized? The best place to start is with an SEO website 
evaluation which you can do yourself in less than an hour. One of the best tools to do an SEO website evaluation is called Screaming Frog.
- Start with a keyword list. What is the name of your company? What do you sell? Come up with a list of 50 keywords so you can see how many of them are on your website. If you don’t have a keyword list, you should come up with a quick keyword strategy using Google’s keyword tool.
- Run Screaming Frog, you enter your URL at the top and the frog does the rest. You will get an output of all your webpages and how it looks to Google.
- Sort by response code. Look for 404. These are links that are broken. They need to be fixed so you can make sure Google and your potential customers can find the information you want them to find. You can fix them by either correcting the broken link to where you want it go. Start with Internal and then click on External to make sure any outbound links like say your Facebook Page is not broken
- Click on Page Titles How many are blank? How many contain just your com- pany name? How many are unique? How many are on your keyword list?
- Click on H1 – Same questions – How many are blank? How many are unique? How many of them are on your keyword list?
- Click on URL How many of the URLs contain gobbly gook like numbers or % signs or #s? This means your URLs aren’t clean and if you can’t see words, neither can Google. How many of your URLs contain some of your keywords? Click on Images an then click on Image Info. This will check the Alt Tags How many of these have blanks? How many contain your keywords.
Steps 1-6 will give you a pretty good idea in a short amount of time of how much Google can see of your site and index it. If your site has lots of blanks or it uses your company name only, very little is going to be indexed.
However, if your site contain lots of keywords, it might be simply that you need to swap out keywords for less competitive words so you can rank higher. Now that we are done with the internal audit we can look at moving to an external audit to see how we may be able to improve rankings simply by getting links submitted to Google and fixing any errors.
Go to your browser and enter your website in two ways the first one with www and the second without www. Did one site change to the other or did it stay as www or without www? If it didn’t change, according to Google you have two different sites and the links to your www site don’t count towards your non-www site. You can fix this by redirecting one site to the other. This one fix can have huge implications on search.
Logon to Google Webmaster and choose your website. If you don’t have access, you can associate your account with Google Analytics.
If you have a webmaster account set up, you will land on the Dashboard. In the right hand corner you will see errors. Click on Crawl errors. These URLs will be bad re- directs from other sites or in your own site. You will see the source of the error. By fixing these errors you can get the link credit and improve your web pages search result. Go back to the dashboard and go down to site map. If you have a site map, submit it to Google. This will tell Google where all your pages are so they can index them all.
The last step in an external audit is to see how you rank against other sites and get a baseline on how many people link to your site. One of the best sites for this is open site explorer.
- Enter your website URL.
- You will get a report and it will give you a pretty good idea of how many people link to you
- Domain Authority – Your overall domain and how search engines view it as having relevance. The higher you get to 100 the better.
- Page Authority – This measures how the search engines view your page based on the amount of links to the page and the quality of those links
- Linking root domains – Here are the websites that link to you.
- Total links – The total number links to your website.
These numbers are updated once a month and they give website owners a very good baseline on where their website stands in the view of the search engines. If you want to learn more about SEO you can download our free SEO book as well as contact us for a free SEO Website Evaluation.