Do it Yourself Check Lists:

The world of SEO is ever changing but the basics of Search Engine Optimization are necessary for it to work and these basics will remain the same for sometime to come. Knowing the ever changing idiosyncrasies of SEO, comes from following those that are involved in programming the machines on how to learn and that world is a blend of what could be, what should be, and what would be nice. It is really only attained from listening, learning, reading between the lines daily and through experimentation. The following are for the most part, the basics from 2016 and into today, the ingredients for the evaluation of website and web design Search Engine Optimization.

Crawlability of Website

1. Assess the Website’s Current State of SEO:

PageRank, Domain Authority, Trust Factor, Backlinks, Referring Domains, indexed pages just to name just a few.

Competitive Analysis: Know your competition; Competitive Analysis is recurring theme, don’t let it distract from excelling with your own finds.

2. Keyword  and Secondary Keywords

Search Engines will always need to assess the topic of the web page and without proper indicators such as keywords the Search Engine will not be able to properly define the content of the webpage and therefore not return it for the search request.

Competitive analysis; what are the keywords other sites in your vertical looking to optimize? An analysis of the Keyword searches also provides for the potential customer base in a sought after vertical market.

Check the activity of particular keywords in any particular area and the activities for keywords addressing the same idea. These keywords become the searches to play for and the foundation on which your content is naturally crafted.

Keyword density is important, base point here is you don’t need to over stuff it, if you are looking for long-term rankings keep the keyword in active places at a percentage point of less than 1 and not higher than 3 of the links and content.  Use variants of the Keyword if necessary.

3. Backlinks and Anchor Text Analysis:

There is a lot to be considered here and the earlier in the audit you get a handle on it the better the SEO Audit and Backlink Profile will be. Backlinks and Anchor Text combined with Social Media and Content Marketing are the essence of SEO in 2016 and getting your website to Google’s 1st Page without the recurring cost of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

How Backlinks Work: You build a backlink, Google indexes the backlink and puts the new backlink into a database for your website, which is also known as your “link profile” as the procedure is repeated a “link profile” is built that the Penguin algorithm can analyze.

Link types and the percentage of their use is relevant to optimizing your page rank and ensuring that you are not penalized by Penguin. Conservatively  the following percentages have been proven to work.

Branded Anchor Text: 50%

Google looks for you to create a brand. The easiest ways for them to tell a “brand” from a SEO-driven website is by the number of branded anchors hitting the site.

Naked Links: 25%

Naked links are a natural anchor text.

Generic Anchors: 20%

Generic anchors like “click here” but be diverse and provide that it isn’t related to your keyword.

LSI, Partial Match Anchors: 1-5%

Variations of your main keyword.

Exact Match Anchors: Less Than 1%

The less you use an exact match Anchor, the more powerful it becomes.

Remember too the effect Your Social Media will have on your link building.

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4. Study the Crawlability of the Website:

Check for accessibility issues, and Status Codes, redirects, 301, 302, 404. and robots.txt,

Ensure desired content is getting indexed on Google. Check Site Architecture – how the various folders and subfolders in the website are organized and inter-linked, organize content properly into various folders and subfolders, and check that URL architecture demonstrates the organizational structure of the website. Use your site’s internal links, and anchor text to show the Structure of your site. Use these principles and the alt text to be  informative, and avoid repetition.

Check for Adobe Flash or Javascript they don’t mobilize well and in many cases Html is more effective.  Check for HTML syntax errors and coding violations.

5. Additional Site Content:

Title, header elements, meta descriptions, and structured data.

Titles less than 65 words in length, more might dilute the effect ?

Only one H1 per page – effectiveness of H-4 tag may be higher than others.

Unique Title per web page to fit Keyword Search parameters (Caution on over obvious SEO manipulations).

Does the meta description fit Keyword Search parameters, provide a good summary of the page’s content and provide for the call to action, click the link to the website ? This is the content that is display to describe your website on the Google search pages.

6. Additional On Page Content:

Unique content: 

Check onsite pages for duplicate content. In many Cases the duplicate content is so obvious you can copy the text from a page of the website and paste it into the google search bar and hope that you don’t find 500 websites running your exact content. Google does penalize you for duplicate content. You can also use Siteliner.

Eliminate plagiarism.

The ideal word length is 300-500-800. Check the competition for and do comparative analysis. Assessing the usefulness of your website’s content, is another area for a comparative analysis. Is there a reason Google should rank your site above others taking into consideration that that google can understand ?

Generally, keep the site’s readability factor targeted to grade 8 to 10 comprehension and minimize use of abbreviations. Read-Able is a useful tool for determining this.

Eliminate keyword stuffing, Google can easily see this. SEOBook – is a keyword analyzer that will help with this as well.

Image Attributes:

Images ALT tags are another opportunity for keywords and also provide a text display if image doesn’t load. Avoids repetition.

Hyperlinks:

Linking to relevant high authority sites may improve page rank, as well as stated before use your site’s internal links, and anchor text to show the Structure of your site.

Check for Broken Links and other link errors, ie. 404 errors

Ensure the Quality of the outbound links. Check for Spammy incoming links one quality incoming link is more effective than numerous spammy links, check your Link Type percentages.

Mobile Websites:

Check load times, less than 4 seconds is ideal and any more than 7 seconds the chances are good your potential customer/client will book the search, ensure no flash and that the site is mobile friendly. As of April 21 2015, or Mobilegeddon,  google has suggested that your desktop site will be penalized if it doesn’t mobilize well. You can use google’s webmaster tool to see that your mobile website is mobile friendly.

Local SEO:

This is another very effective avenue for ensuring your website and web design is found on the web. DataPro Smart Search puts all these elements into effect providing for effective Search Engine Page Placement.

In Summary:

Over the years Search Engine Optimization Algorithms have evolved to take into consideration many variables, below is an infographic on the many elements of SEO so you can see that this is only a partial list but a necessary list to avoid Search Engines Penalties. These and other elements of SEO are reviewed and optimized in any Website or  Web Design task undertaken by DataPro.

Any and all these factors can be managed to a level that ensures your success in SEO. If you are interested in more information on SEO contact us for a FREE consultation.

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