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.
SEO: Reasons Why Your Google Traffic Might Have Dropped
Recently, Ann Smarty over at Search Engine Journal posted an article “5 Reasons Why Your Google Traffic Might Have Dropped” and today we’re going to summarize what she’s pointing out to you in the article.
The main reasons why your Google traffic may have dropped are probably related to one of these situations:
- You’ve been penalized.
- Your site has been hacked.
- Google is tweaking its algorithm.
- Overall (seasonal) change in searches.
- Your competitors increased their promotional efforts.
If in fact you have been penalized by something that you did then you will need to work hard to figure out what exactly it was that you did on your website that Google did not like. Once you have taken off anything that may be conceived as something that violates their guidelines then you can ask for a re-inclusion. If you pass a human review, then you should be forgiven.
The second likely option is your website being hacked. If your website has been hacked and this is a common scenario here lately, you will need to figure out just what they did. Some red flags that you have been hacked are Google webmaster tools showing you that some of the terms that you were found by recently are not relevant to your website as well as getting an increase in traffic for keywords not related to your website such as casino or hotel. Once you have taken off anything that may be conceived as something that violates their guidelines then you can ask for a re-inclusion.
The next item that could have caused your rankings to drop was Google making changes to their index. They are always going to continually update their datacenters to weed out spam and whatnot.
Obviously, if you sell Christmas trees and it’s only June you’re going to see a dip in your traffic simply because nobody is searching for Christmas trees in June.
The last option is that your competitors increased their promotional efforts based on your website outranking them. Always keep an eye out for what your competitors are doing while continuing to improve your on-site SEO.
If you need any help with understanding why your competitors have passed you by in the organic rankings, the Support Team at Regency Interactive can assist you with getting your website back to where it was previously in the search engine listings.
Tags: search engine optimization, seo, web design, website analysis, website design, website optimizationWebsite Redesign: What’s Wrong With Best Swim Wear?
We have a new site for the series “What’s Wrong With This Website” as I came across this website this weekend while I was looking for some new swim trunks: BestSwimWear.com. The first thing that stuck out to me was the out-of-date look the site had to it with the “default” link colors around the images due to borders being set up on the images. Then, when you scroll to the bottom you see that the website was designed and copyrighted in 1996. I’m willing to believe that this is how the website looked back then in 1996. Let’s begin the analysis!
The first thing that I noticed is that the main header image is predominately gray, but yet the name brand images have a shadow behind them while also having a white background around them as well. This would look more professional if it was all just white minus the shadows since the rest of the website is white.
Next, you can see that they are using a text-based navigation menu that is actually an image. There’s no rollover to these images so I’m not quite sure why they used an image. Especially since the font is just an ordinary font each user would already have on their computer. There are so many images that can capture your attention above the fold that you can actually miss their navigation and scroll right on past it. You should always make sure your users can find what they need on the website as well as be able to find the menu to click on.
We already pointed out that the images use a default blue border around them which means that they are not using any up-to-date CSS or anything. They could just update their look real simple by using CSS.
Which leads me to my last item critique. I came across this website by doing a search on Google for “mens swimsuit” and yet they only have 3 name brands to offer its male customers. However, they have 35 name brands to offer its female customers. By offering more lingerie and women’s swimsuits it’s pretty obvious that your website is not really catering towards men.
This brings a close to the series “What’s Wrong With This Website” for the time being. With SMX Advanced being today and tomorrow we’ll be posting some topics that come up from that conference. I’m sure it will be a good one!
If you’re interested in a website critique, feel free to contact Regency Interactive today at 252-428-0200!
Tags: web design, web redesign, website analysis, website design, website redesignWebsite Redesign: What Is Wrong With USB Media Company?
Hello folks! We’re back with our series on “What Is Wrong With This Website” and today we’re featuring USB Media Company. The support team at Regency Interactive came across this company when we were looking for custom USB jump drives.
Here are a few things that we don’t like about this site:
- The colors are too plain on the site; the color scheme is more like a boring doctor’s office colors rather than a high tech product’s website. Their products come in all different sizes and colors so why can’t their website?
- The company information that they provide you does not give you enough information about them. Who’s to say that this isn’t a company that just drop ships the products to you from a third party company?
- We also think their customers do not like the fact that they cannot order straight from their website. Money spent on online ordering is growing exponentially each day so why would you not provide this option to your customers?
- As a company looking at custom flash drives we were looking for some flash drives at least 8 GB in capacity and theirs seem to only go to 4 GB. Right now you can get flash drives as high as 32 GB as well as 64 GB.
- The last big thing that sticks out to us is they show you what services that they can offer you, but they don’t demonstrate the type of work that they can do you. A portfolio of custom USB jump drives that they have done in the past would be enough for a customer to look past these other flaws that their website has and order from them anyway.
- As far as SEO issues that the website has we found quite a few things there that they could improve such as title tags, their body content, link title tags and so forth.
Stay tuned tomorrow for the latest post in our series!
Tags: regency interactive, regency interactive corporation, web design, web redesign, website analysis, website design, website redesignSearch Engine Optimization: What Is SEO???
Shoemoney from Shoemoney.com emailed some of the top people in the SEO industry and polled them to see what their answers would be for the following question: “What is your definition of SEO?”. Here are their answers:
Danny Sullivan AKA godfather of SEO:
An SEO is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided. A search marketer, by the way, is someone that ensures listing in both paid and unpaid listings.
Rand Fishkin:
SEO is the combination of tactics and strategies, including, but not limited to, optimization of information architecture, usability, content focus, audience targeting, design, development, keyword research, keyword placement, link building, social media marketing and any other online or offline branding/marketing elements that support the goal of receiving more traffic from search engines.
Neil Patel:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of understanding search engines and and using that knowledge to make a website rank high on search engines.
Andy Beal:
Making changes to the on-page and off-page relevance of a web page in an effort to increase the volume of quality traffic from the search engines.
Regency Interactive:
Obviously, we were not polled by Shoemoney, but we thought we would let our users know what SEO is in our opinion. SEO is having the knowledge of how and why a website can/is ranked high within the major search engines and illustrating to your clients how they can achieve these high rankings as well. With an SEO friendly design, proper coding, high quality content and a good link building strategy along with some other factors your site can achieve those high rankings that you’re after. Contact us today and let us show you how!
To continue reading the article, click here.
Tags: search engine optimization, seo, website analysis, website optimization, what is seo
