General analysis on a website for SEO purposes is when you do a look from the top of the website. It’s just what its names imply: a general analysis. The purpose of such an analysis is to provide a quick report on a website and to identify week points, strong elements and things that need to be done. This is only the beginning of an SEO orientated look to a website and should identify the most immediate actions that need to be taken.
It will not solve the problems of the website.
You should not expect that a general analysis will provide full information. You have to realize that obtaining in depth info on every page of your website and what is the exact status of keyword targeting on every page, where your links are coming from and other things that are related to search engine optimization requires time.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about the key elements that are required (in my opinion – feel free to add some more of this in comments bellow) on a general website analysis.
Code analysis.
This is basically when you’re looking at the page source code generated by the server. In some situations you’ll have to see the source code but in many cases you don’t need to. Here is what you’ll look for:
- Title tag: should be present. Note the title of the page because you’ll use it when you’ll check the keyword targeting status. Here is more about titles and how to create interest with it.
- Description metatag: should be present and should also contain the keywords for that page. Although it will not improve your rankings it will help underline the keywords searched since is the first thing that search engines display right after the title of the page
- Subtitles h1, h2, h3: note the actual text of the content. Should contain the main keyword and secondary keywords for that page
- The alt property from the img tag: this will not improve your rankings but having a descriptive text for that image will help you with image search (this is not something to ignore as images are searched more often)
- Anchor text: check to see if it’s pointing into the website or outside of it:
- If the link points to another website make sure that it does that with no keyword that you’re working to rank your website
- If the link is pointing to a inner page of your own website here are some tips: check the text of the link. It should be relevant not only to the page where it’s placed but also to the page it links. It’s best to link to a direct anchor in a page. Place the anchor in the proximity of words that are related to the text of the anchor
- Check the names of files placed on a page: every file should have a relevant name, connected to the page title and content
- Look at the code of the page and see what the search engine will see first: content, menu, sidebars, adds. The best thing to do is to make sure to have the content first. You can do this by having the sidebar on the right of the website
Text analysis.
This is the part where you take all the information that you picked from the above analysis and compare it to the actual text of the page. The main keyword should be present on the first paragraph, in the middle of the article and the last paragraph, anchor text, an h1-h3, in alt property of images in the name of the files. Don’t force an unnatural density of keywords. Scatter some other related keywords and synonyms in your content.
Index analysis.
Check to see if all the pages of the website are indexed. Check to see if the number of pages differs when searching with the “www” or without it. If not all the pages are indexed you should check the website architecture to try and identify the problem. Also check to see if there is a sitemap that would help the indexing process.
Link architecture.
Here is a more detailed article just on that subject.
Take a quick look at the analytic software reports.
Here are some things to follow: how the general graphic of the visitors looks like (a sinusoidal one usually indicates good keyword targeting and the fact that the general traffic comes from search engines), see when the spikes are and try to understand why it occur. Check the traffic sources: search engines should be number one. If not, see what the other sources are and do a quick analysis on the relevancy of these sources. Do a quick analysis of the highest bounce rate pages: see where the main traffic for those pages comes from, what is the source and decide if the bounce rate is real or not (many times a bounce rate can signify that you market to the wrong kind of people).
These are the main elements that I think a general website analysis for SEO purpose should contain.
If you have any questions, suggestions or want to add something please do it in comments bellow.
Admiring all the effort you put into your blog. I particular liked this post. See ya, Julian Blanchflower ~ Flyttst
WowI had never thought the evidently simple ways Google thinks. The truth of the matter is that even though it “indexes” your page countless times, it takes a metric tonne of work on your part to get your site to become relevent to the big G. This lends to my understanding of search engine optimization.