SEO Explained - Page 16
A SEO Healthcheck of your website

A simple health check of your on-site SEO can be obtained by visiting Summit Media’s Spider simulator http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/.   While a little bit simplistic, this tool is a good very basic overview of the main onsite factors for a page.   This will check for heading tags, meta tags, title’s and the body text of your site.

Other checks to perform to ensure your SEO situation is in good shape.

1. Perform a site:www.yoursite.com search on Google.   Ensure that your pages aren’t all listed in the supplemental index per the instructions above.


2. Visit each page on your site.   Ensure that your <title> and meta description, keywords tags are not all duplicated across all pages.


3. Check to ensure that each of your pages has a reasonable body of content containing your keywords.


4. Perform a link:www.yoursite.com search on Google which will show you a sample of your inbound links (note: this search wont show all links, Google only shows a random sample).  You should expect to see some inbound links – if you don’t then you need to get onto your link building.   Another way to check your inbound links is do a search on Google for “www.yoursite.com”  enclosed in double quotation marks.  This will show you any webpages which contain this text – which will usually be pages linking to you.


5. Check your current PageRank™ on the Google toolbar.   This figure is only updated every 3 months, so don’t despair if your brand new site shows a PageRank™ of zero.  If your site has been around for a while (> 12 months) then a PageRank™ of zero either means that you’ve been neglecting SEO in a big way, or you may have been penalised by Google for some reason.

Choosing the best web addresses for your web pages

When naming your pages, terms like product1.html are not ideal. br /> If possible, use meaningful names separated by dashes ie nike-sneakers.html or Dunlop-running-shoes.html.   These count (in a small way) towards your page optimisation.

Similarly, with your main website name.   These are referred to as “Search Engine Friendly” web addresses or URL’s. 

Many eCommerce engines or content management systems, when installed out of the box use URL’s like

http://www.ecommerce-website.com/catalog/default.php?cPath=23&osCsid=8d588139d3

This can be a serious problem when the search engines come visiting.   Long convoluted url’s with obscure terms separated by &’s and ?’s are far from ideal when your site is being indexed.   Most of these software systems (online shopping carts, or content management systems) have “plugin” software extensions which will convert your url’s from ones like the example above to something more like :

http://www.ecommerce-website.com/products/left-handed-widgets.html

…which is far better.

Page 17 - Content Management System SEO & PageRank