5 Simple SEO checks for your website
If you are thinking of looking into running an Internet Marketing campaign then why not look over the items below and run through them on your own website. They should give you an idea at a very basic level of how your website could ans should be performing:
1) Analytics
Installing an Analytics package has nothing to do with how you will rank but it will let you track how your website is performing, how people are finding it, whether they are staying on the website, whether they are leaving straight away and where they are coming from (typed address in directly, Google, Yahoo, Bing or from a link on another website), to name a few. Google Analytics is our favorite as it’s free and fast to install as well as providing incredibly detailed reports.
2) Titles
In your browser, load up your website and look at the very top (in the blue bar) – the text in here is called your Title. Firstly there should be a title there (not just saying Internet Explorer but a descriptive title of your page content). Each page should have its own unique title and should describe the content of the page. Remember that Google uses the page title in the search results so whatever is in here is the first thing a visitor could learn about your company.
3) Validation to W3C standards
Your website can still perform well in the search engines despite not validating but it does have several other benefits that are worth considering and having clean, validated code can only make the search engines job easier! You can check whether your website validates by going here and typing in your web address.
4) Text for Navigation
Navigation that is built with images gives the search engines a harder job as they may not see that the image is navigation and so may not be able to ‘travel’ though your site as easily as they should. If you are unsure whether your navigation is in images or text then try to highlight the text in the navigation (left click on the text and move the mouse along it), if you cannot highlight the words (like you normally could if you were trying to copy and paste some text) then it will most likely be an image.
5) Text instead of Flash
Sometimes websites are built entirely using Flash. This means the search enignes cannot so easily read the text (depending on the way the Flash movie has been built). To test your own site hold Ctrl + A which will highlight all of the text on the page so if nothing is highlighted then there is no text for the search enignes to read.
If you have carried out the checks above and have concerns or maybe you just don’t have time to do all this yourself, then contact us for a {cms_selflink page=’Free-website-healthcheck’ text=’FREE website healthcheck’} and we will give you a very helpful report on the above points (and a few more to boot) and also some suggestions as to help improve your website and rankings!