SEO: SEO Site Reviews Step-by-Step

A couple of weeks ago SEOmoz posted a Whiteboard Friday video of SEOmoz Global Associate, Tom Critchlow, explaining the “site review” process. We wanted to summarize what the video was about so that our readers could see just how thorough site reviews are as well as how well thought out they are too!

Feel free to check out the video after you have finished reading our summarization.

First Impressions - Look at the website as the user would. For example, look at it as far as conversions, usability, long forms and are concerned.
Accessibility/Spiderability - Look at it as a robot by turning off javascript, cookies & CSS to see what the website looks like; does it have all of the content visible? Also, be sure to check out the robots.txt file to make sure you’re allowing robots to crawl your website. Next, use the crawl test tool on SEOmoz’s website to see if your website is crawlable. Also, be sure to browse as Googlebot so that you can see what it will see.
Google Health Check - Make sure to do a Google health check, i.e. performing the following:
- site search: “site:regencyinteractive.com” (minus the quotation marks)
- Brand searches such as your company name
- Look at the Google cache and pay particular attention to your important pages to see if your content shows up.
Duplicate Content - It’s important to make sure that there’s not duplicate content within the web results. Search for content strings within quotations to find content scrapers. Also check the web results for non www vs www versions of your website as well as check all domains look hosted on that particular web server. Look at all of their domains (use site only ip check).
Website URLS – You need to ensure that the website only has one URL per page. Don’t have a dynamic URL for it as well as a static version. Also, make sure your URLs are clean, short and descriptive with your keywords targeted in them.
Title Tags - Make sure that your website has unique title tags and that they are descriptive.
Content Review - Make sure that you have enough content throughout the website and that you also use header tags that contain your keyword phrases.
Meta Tags - It’s key that you don’t have a meta description that is too long. Also, make sure if there is a robots tag that it has been done correctly.
Redirects - You should use live http headers (Firefox extension) to check out headers codes and so forth. Also, it’s helpful to check everything else as well.
Internal Linking - You should check the # of links then check out the # of links on homepage then the # links on category pages to make sure it’s a good ratio and that it will not stand out to the search engines. Also, look to see if there is any anchor text within the content as well as look for links to nofollow. He makes reference to also checking for pagination.
Geo-location - Make sure your IP address is the right address for your targeted location. Be sure to check out SEOmoz’s tool for this as well.
External Linking - Look to see what anchor text is pointing to your site to make sure that they’re not all the same anchor text. Review any type of deep linking to make sure that all of the links are not just to the homepage, but are actually spread throughout website. Also, look to see if they look natural. If you have any paid links and they look obviously paid then you need to fix it.
Semantic HTML - Look through the website to make sure that the website does not have bulky pages (long load time), poorly formatted code or that it’s missing alt/title text relevant to page that it’s linking to on the website.