I’ve been working on a search-engine inspired review of a client’s websites this week. Having been in the business for longer than I care to remember, it’s nice that search engine optimisation of websites now has some scientific substance, rather than being a black art involving loading the site with as many keywords as possible and sundry other dirty tricks.
Search engines are far more sensitive to poorly structured HTML now, so I tend to start any review by going through the website with SortSite (http://www.powermapper.com/). This nifty little tool will go through a whole website listing broken links, accessibility issues and non-compliance with standards. It’s a great piece of kit, especially as it makes it easy to see where the problems lie and how they can be fixed.
The next step is to look at where the site has appeared in searches and assess click-through rates. Again, modern tools make the job so much easier. In the old days, with a bit of luck you could work out what search terms had been used, but of course, you had no idea of why people weren’t coming through to you. Google’s Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) are an absolute godsend. Not only can you see where the site has appeared in searches and where users have clicked through, but also details of what Google has indexed, errors that Googlebot has encountered, and even who is linking to you. It’s a really easy way to find out which keywords and phrases are performing well, and which you need to work on. Bing does have an alternative (http://www.bing.com/webmaster), but it’s not nearly as good.
Once all that’s been done, I usually turn my attention to the content on the pages. Getting filenames, titles, meta-descriptions, headlines and copy right, particularly the opening paragraph, is absolutely essential. I won’t go into the rules too deeply, but getting your keyword(s) as close to the start as possible seems the best way for search engines to see them as significant. Again, it’s nice to have some rules to go by, rather than just hoping for the best. Unfortunately I have to rely on my own tools to collate all the data, if anyone has any recommendations I’d love to hear them.
Finally, once I’ve got a good idea of the strength and weaknesses, it’s good to evaluate the keywords used. Clients are often good at loading their sites with product names, but it’s hard to get to grips with the broader terms used. Again, Google have come up trumps with their Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal). Give it the URL of your website and it will come up with a list of suggested keywords, along with the estimated number of searches, so you can figure out which keywords are likely to generate the most traffic. It’s intended to be used in creating AdWords, but it’s pretty useful for broader SEO too.
So, like I said, much easier than in the bad old days!
