How to Analyze Your Website for SEO

Although there are standard practices for Search Engine Optimization that almost all SEO Experts agree on, there are also many areas some deem unimportant and others say have to be done. All SEO techniques do not work on every website. Each website is unique and you have to develop the best method for just that website you are working on. In other words with each of the techniques I am going to talk about in this article keep in mind that “Your mileage may vary.

First, let’s define SEO for the purposes of this article. Many people regard SEO as a wide variety of services. Search Engine Submissions, coding, meta tags, text content, optimizing load time, link building, directory submissions, buying and trading links, and more all fall under the heading of Search Engine Optimization to many SEO Experts.

According to websearchworkshop.co.uk, SEO is the term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content and structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.

That is about the closest definition that applies to this article. In this article we will be discussing on-site SEO and how to analyze a website to see what needs to be done to improve it’s relevancy for the targeted keywords and how to make sure the website is actually ready to be crawled by the search engines. We will also be exploring how to make sure the navigation of the website can be improved to enhance both your visitor’s experience and to make sure that page rank is spread throughout the website and not just for the front page.

Search engines crawl and index web pages, not websites. That is very important to keep in mind when doing SEO for your website. Every single page is a possible entry point for your visitors. As long as you have set up the navigation properly, you don’t care which page they enter first because all the links to the other pages will also be there. Each page gives you another chance to rank high for your keywords and phrases.

Each page should be optimized to target 1-3 keywords or phrases that actually apply to the content on just that page. I see all the time where someone uses the same keyword meta tags, description meta tags, and even the same title for every page in their website. This is not the way to optimize your website properly. The keywords and phrases you use in the webpage should be reflected in that page’s tag and title.

We are going to analyze an existing website, discount-spanish-property.co.uk and see what needs to be done. For the article we are only going to analyze the index page. No one thing you do will get you high search engine results. It is a combination of things you do that gets you good results. So we will be analyzing several things you can do to your website to enhance your results. You can do each of these things to your website as you read this article.

For this website, we are choosing to target the following keywords and phrases. Spanish Property, Spain Real Estate, and Homes for Sale in Spain. If it was my website, I would obviously find other words to target as well, but for the purposes of this article, we will just target three for our example.

First let’s look at the domain name. Some SEO Experts will tell you the domain name does not matter. I disagree. I have high rankings in Google, MSN, and Yahoo for keywords and phrases that match the domain names I chose. It is not the only reason I got those rankings but it is one factor.

Using Wordtracker.com and Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool you can see that Spanish Property gets searched for but that the word discount associated with it does not. However you need to keep in mind that none of these tools is completely accurate. Just because Overture says a key phrase doesn’t get searches does not make it so. It is just a way to confirm what you think your target audience searches for.

The domain name does have one of the key phrases we are targeting so we are in good shape there. Many people ignore putting keywords into their domain name. Why add a handicap? Do each and every part of SEO like it was the one thing that will get you high rankings in the search engines and you will do very well overall.

Next we are going to use a really cool little tool to tell us some information about the website. It’s called Web Page Analyzer and is at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze We type in the full URL to the page we want to analyze in the top box and hit submit.

Okay, in the first section it shows the title, etc. We will be doing that with the actual source code later. I use this tool to tell me other information that is important to optimizing a website for the search engines. So scroll down to the bottom to Analysis and Recommendations.

Some of the headers here will be green, some yellow, and some are red. If you have all green, then you have done a good job with load time and requests. Yellow means that you could improve but not too bad. Red means you need to do something here.

For our samples site, TOTAL_HTML, TOTAL_SCRIPT, and MULTIM_SIZE are all green so we know we can ignore that right now. TOTAL_CSS and HTML_SIZE are in yellow, but you will also see that anything that is over 30k is considered by this analyzer to be a problem. There was a time when that was true. But many people are connected at faster speeds now and I would say anything over 100k would be a problem, so again for our sample site we are going to ignore those.

TOTAL_OBJECTS, TOTAL_IMAGES, IMAGES_SIZE, SCRIPT_SIZE, and CSS_SIZE are all in red. As you can see it also gives you suggestions as to what you can do to fix those problems. Combining scripts, images can give you a faster load time and load time can affect both how you rank in the search engines and whether your visitors actually see your website rather than choosing to click away because your pages load too slow.

Don’t put a lot of JavaScript into your WebPages’s source code. Put them in files and use includes. Combine JavaScript files into one where you can so less objects are called. Optimize those images or consider losing some that are not absolutely necessary.

Many times people use a program that cuts up images into lots of tiny pieces or they use a lot of spacer.gif type images. Each of those little images is a whole line of code. This is what we will look at next.

Code to Text Ratio. http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio is where a tool for this can be found. Again type the full URL to the webpage to be analyzed. For our sample site, I had to add /index.html to the URL to get it to work, so you may also have to do that with the page you want to analyze.

The result here was 10%. That means it’s 10% text and 90% code. The spider crawls the source code so how relevant will you actually be for the keywords you target if you are only using 10% of your webpage to add them? Now you see the importance of eliminating any code that does not need to be there.

If I were doing SEO for this website, I would reduce the amount of code AND I would also be adding more text and raising the keyword content within that text to make up for this ratio.

Now go to the page you are optimizing and go up to view/source in your browser. You open it in notepad and select all and paste it into your html editor so you can work on it. Go right to the title tag. Many people stuff the title tag with a dozen or more keywords. I don’t recommend that at all. I recommend you choose one keyphrase that will be your major SEO target for that webpage For our sample website I am going to change the title to , Spain Real Estate. I would use the other keyphrases to title other pages.

Description meta tags is what will be just under the title in the search engine results page where people can see what your webpage is about Yes again, webpage not website. Write a unique description containing the keywords and phrases that actually describe that page. In addition to that, write it so it is appealing to people and in a way that encourages them to click to visit your page.

Keywords meta tags has debatable importance., however you will not be penalized by having it so it should be done properly and included anyway. Even smaller search engines might have good traffic for you and they might give weight to keyword meta tags.

I use delimited text to format keywords. I see it done 100 different ways and don’t believe anyone knows for sure which is correct. I do know that computers read delimited text, so I format my keywords this way. Delimited text is word,word,word,anotherword,etc. no spaces and only a comma separating the words. No phrases. The bots can and will make their own phrases out of the keywords.

So we don’t need to put in spain real estate, spain villa, spain property, spain homes for sale, homes for sale in spain, etc. we can do it this way. Spain,Spanish,realestate,real,estate,property,home,house,villa,condo,apartment,

townhouse,forsale,sale,buyer,seller,agent,realtor.

Around 20 words is the most I would use. Note I did not put in both home and homes. The bots treat them the same and recognize it either way as singular. Some of them can also separate words like real estate from realestate.

Alt Tags also need to be added to every image in the webpage. Use one keyword or phrase in each image that both relates to the image and the page you are optimizing for the search engines. Do not stuff them with paragraphs of text. I’ve seen alt tags that look like Ebooks. This will not help you. Doing them properly can.

Clean up any extra code that does not need to be in the webpage so the code to text ratio improves, then write more text that people will read on the page. Remember to write for your visitors not just for the bots. Optimizing your webpage for the search engines will not help if no one will buy from you..

Just keep your keywords and phrases you choose to target for that page in mind as you write interesting text content that helps sell your product to your potential customers. There is no set percentage. Just make sure the keywords are repeated a few times where it makes sense to do so.

I know there are more things that can be done for SEO on each of your web pages, but I hope this article has put you on the right track and encouraged you to understand how both the search engines and your visitors see your website.



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Chris Taylor is the director of Catdynamics, an established online company which specializes in all areas of online business implementation, internet marketing and search engine optimization. Catdynamics core philosophy is to “Help web based business achieve unique distinction & maximum growth by building life-time, client based relationships".




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