SEO Site Analysis – How to Do?

So you are an SEO Consultant?

Yes!

Then you might perform few tests to check the current SEO status of the proposed site and other things. Right?

Of course!

How to do Complete Site analysis when any SEO project comes to you?

Here are few points you must look out while analyzing the website:-

Current On page SEO Status:

The very first thing you should look out in a site is that its On site SEO stuffs such as keywords placement, Title, Meta description, image alt text.

Internal linking structure, Content quality, page redirects, URL Structure, sitemap and Robots.txt etc.

• Further reading:- [All About Alt Text]

Let’s Understand these one by one:-

1. Keyword Placement: – keywords are the most important part of a website or blog. It’s good to check whether main targeted keywords are well placed in the title, meta description and content of site properly.

If main targeted keywords are not placed throughout the site then its too tough to rank the site well with those keywords. So it is essential to check out the keyword placement status in the very beginning. This analysis gives you an idea to plan your SEO strategy for that site.

2. Title tags: – Check whether Title tag is present on every pages or not. If not then you may add it to your plan. If already added then check whether the primary keywords are used there or not. Also check the number of words in a title because it should not be more than 60 characters (with spaces) because Google truncate the characters after 60.

3. Meta Description: – Same as Title Tag, check if Meta description for each page is present or not. If not then do add it but if already added then check them carefully that how keywords are used and how many? Usually a primary keyword might be used at least once and at most two. Don’t just stuff too many keywords or repeat the same keyword in description. Also Check for length as Google displays only 160 Characters (with spaces) in the Search pages.

4. Meta Keywords: – However Meta keywords attribute doesn’t hold much value as the major SEs like Google and Bing don’t index this but yes Yahoo still reads it so its better to add it too to get benefit in Yahoo.

5. Image Status: Images are the important part of a website or blog posts. But as you know SEs only index texts not images so its necessary to optimize the images by adding proper alt text to them which makes these searchable. So this is also a matter of concern whether it is done or not.

6. Content Quality: In the age of Google Panda content becomes the most important part of any kind of website.

Do check whether the site has unique and quality content or not. If you find plagiarised content then you must change the content. Good quality content helps a site rank well in SEs and also engage users for longer duration which results into low bounce rates on your site.

7.  Internal Linking: Internal linking means to link one page to other pages on specific anchors. Internal links plays great role in engaging users as well as SEs crawlers for longer duration.

That’s why do check if the site is having good internal links. If not then you have to consider this but if its already done then Do check if the links are on relevant anchors or not.

8. Redirection:- You should always check if there are redirects on the site. If there are then make sure that they should be 301 permanent redirects because it passes all the link value to the redirected link.  Redirection simply means to forward a url adress to other.
For example if you open techtricksworld.blogpsot.com then it will open www.techtricksworld.com You can do 302 temporary redirect or 301 permanent redirect. 302 redirect doesn’t pass the link juice but 301 passes all the link juices to the destination links. This is the reason 301 redirect is recommended for better SEO.

9. Sitemap and Robots.txt:- Check whether xml sitemap is created and submitted into Google webmasters. Also check the robots.txt if it is properly written.

10. Navigation:– See if the site has better navigation and search functionality. If its not there, then do implement it. Better navigation means a user can easily reach to every important page in one single click from home page.

Now, coming to search functionality, there must be a good search functionality on every page of the site so that a user can search anything on the site from any page. Both navigation and Search are important for better user experience.

11. Url Sturcture:- Url structure should be human readable, not the parameter driven.

Example:-
Site.com/Index.aspx?mid=4&sid=24 = Not recommended

Site.com/Google-algo-panda/ = Recommended

These are simply onsite things you need to study and according to these make plan for your ON Page SEO strategy.

Also Url should not be too long because if it goes too long then SEs truncate the extra characters. I don’t remember actually how many characters are fine in Url but yes too long urls are not recommended.

Now its time to check the link profile of the website! By link profile I simply mean backlinks of the website.

Yes, its very important to know about the backlinks of the site.  A little bit of idea, you can get from the Alexa’s site linking in functionality. You can easily figure out about the types of website linking to the site, which you are analysing. I mean you will know whether the links are coming from blogs, article site, directories or any other kind of sites.

Analyze those links and if you find few spammy links then you can always use the Disavow Tool to tell Google not to consider those spam links. check out the video:-

After Checking the link profile and all, move on to the Social Presence of the website. Yes, Social presence is very important now days so check out if the website’s presence is good enough on Social media or not.

To check Social media presence you can check whether the site has a FB fan page, a twitter handle, having pinterest boards, Brand page on Google+

After checking all these, Don’t forget to check these too:-

1. Daily/monthly traffic trend over the period.
2. Traffic Sources.
3. bounce rates from all the traffic sources.
4. Pages which are most viewed.
5. Keywords which yielded huge traffic.

Okay, Now I want to stop here. All the above are the basic things you must consider before starting the SEO process of any website. After analyzing these points, make your SEO strategy and you will see that, this analysis will help you a lot.

This post is the full description of the Point “Site Analysis” of the post Summarised SEO World.  Stay tuned!. If there is anything in this post which is not clear then please do ask me. I will try my best to solve your all queries.