SEO Step By Step Guide: 10. Website Analysis

In the past five posts, we have been discussing about various aspects of keyword analysis. This should have given a fair idea on keyword analysis and on how to select your keywords to optimize your website. It is time to move on to the next stage, which is website analysis.

You cannot just jump on to your website and start adding the SEO tags. Before you start adding the tags, you must review your website carefully to list the areas where it would require optimization. This applies to both brand new sites as well as old sites.

Factors that you need to consider while analyzing a website for optimization include the following. We will be discussing each aspect in detail in future posts, but for this post, we will just try to highlight the areas that require our attention while optimizing the website.

1.    Title of the page – Each page should have a unique title.
2.    URL structure for all the inner pages.
3.    Head tags if any for old sites including meta keywords and meta description.
4.    Website navigation and the menus.
5.    Names of the images used in the header and in the other parts of the website.
6.    Size of the images used
7.    Alt text for the images.
8.    Flash content that are used and the loading time of the flash content.
9.    Video files if any included. You should check whether the video files have the transcript of the video conversation.
10.    Audio files if any used. Here too you should check whether the audio section has the transcript available in the website.
11.    Content of each page taking into consideration the keyword density.
12.    Headings and Subheadings used in the content.
13.    Existing internal links and hypertexts.
14.    Links in the footer including the copyright information.
15.    Broken links within the site.
16.    Code standard compliance.
17.    Overall site loading time.
18.    Sitemap
19.    Current search ranks for all the keywords if you are re-optimizing your old site in all the major search engines.
20.    Search engine indexing status for all the pages of the website.
21.    Current pagerank in Google.
22.    Number of outgoing links in each page (only external links).

These are factors that you should check when you analyze your website before you start optimizing the website. You cannot browse through your website as if you flip the pages of a magazine. You must perform your website analysis in a systematic way and it should be documented before optimization. Your entire optimization process will depend on your review report. Never overlook any of the above factors considering them trivial. Noting is trivial when it comes to cutthroat competition. You should make sure that your website is superior in all possible ways so that you can stay on top of the competition. Never rush through your analysis and set a deadline for the completion of the website analysis report. If you have a massive site you can use automated tools for checking certain areas such as broken links etc.

SubmitEdge