5 Minute SEO Analysis

When performing SEO you do a lot of quick analysis for clients website’s to give you a quick look into where they stand. There are some major things that you can look at that will only take a couple of minutes.

• The first thing you will want to do is simply go to the homepage of the site and view it as a user would. This will help you identify if the site has good usability and catches your attention. If it does not then that can hurt SEO because you want people to stay on the site.
• Next you will want to look at the url and make sure that it stayed the same and did not do a redirect to another url. If it does redirect then you can have some issues with the amount of link juice that makes it to the page. You will want to type in the url with WWW and non WWW to determine if there is a preferred domain.
• You will want to take a look at the title tag of the homepage which will show up in the top of the browser. This will give you a quick idea of what the page is telling search engines that it is about and wants to be found for.
• The next thing you will want to do is to simply type in the url into a search engine, I advise Google, and see if that page is the #1 result. If it is not then it is not looked at as the authority and may have some indexing issues.
• You can also use the site command as well which will help you see how the pages are being indexed. Type site:www.domain.com into Google and you will see the titles, descriptions, and urls of the pages on the site. This will help you see if this is how the site should be indexed in the search engine. This is one of the fastest ways to see if a site is optimized to an extent.
• You can also see the status of the site in Google by using the Site Status Wizard.
• Global Navigation – The site architecture of a site is crucial for SEO, you want to check if the navigation tabs are links or images. You want them to be links, not images. To do this simply hover your mouse over the navigation and right click your mouse. If it says anything having to do with image like copy image or copy image location or view image then the navigation needs to be fixed.
• You will want to do a quick check of how the site looks like to search engines. To do this you will want to use a lynx browser or you can use another tool called SEO-Browser.
• You will want to do a quick link analysis check because link popularity is very important to search engine algorithms. To do this there are several tools to use however a good one to use is Open Site Explorer.

While there are a lot more things that you have to look at when doing a comprehensive SEO and website analysis these tasks are designed to uncover big problems that may exist that need to be fixed. The most important thing is making sure that the site can be accessible, crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines. To learn more on how to identify potential problems with your site you can look at Google 101

Leave a Reply