SEO: Is Your Website Optimized?
What most website owners do not know is whether their website is search engine optimized. Search engine optimization is key to your website finding potential customers. For that reason alone, you may also be interested to know if your competitor’s website is optimized too. But, how can you tell, if you are not conversant with SEO? Here are some of the finer points to help you understand the SEO concept and analysis.
Search Engine Index
It is important for a website seeking search engine ranking to be placed on the search engine index. When you make a search engine analysis, you should know whether your website is listed on that search engine. Let us take the example of Google search engine, since it is the most popular of all search engines. To confirm whether your site is listed, make a search of it by name in the Google search engine. If it does not show up, type the words – site:www.url.com – on the search engine. The result will show how many web pages of your site are indexed on Google. In case of no result, the site may not have been indexed, or may have been penalized.
Links
How popular your site is depends on the incoming links. Inbound links lend credence to websites, and search engines consider these as a measure of popularity of websites. In short, more the number of incoming links that a website has, higher the ranking it is provided. If you like to measure the link popularity of your site look for the PageRank. It is one measurement that cannot be relied upon, as it is not very accurate and is not updated frequently. However, type in the Yahoo search engine the words – linkdomain:www.url.com. The results give a fair view of the links.
Keywords and Key Phrases
While doing an SEO analysis, it is imperative to find out the use of keywords and key phrases in the content. There are many places on the website where you can place key phrases. Looking at the source code, you will be able to find their location. Once you open a website, click on “view” on the Internet Explorer menu, and then on “source”. Check the title, meta keywords, and meta description to find whether key phrases have been used in these areas.
Content
Content is king; and that is what the search engine considers true. Check the content for keyword and key phrase use. Each page should contain a minimum 200 to 300 words and around 1 to 2 keywords or keyword phrases. If the density of keywords is too high, the website can be penalized.
Navigation
How user-friendly is your website navigation will help determine its search engine ranking. If all web pages are easily accessible, you can expect all of them to be indexed by the search engine. If the search engine crawler has a tough time crawling through your entire website, it will drop all those pages off the index that it finds difficult to access. To avoid this situation, it is imperative to have a sitemap on the website with appropriate text links to facilitate search engines access the entire site.
Keeping the above SEO analysis in mind, you can do a good job of testing your website and determining the gray areas that need your attention. Following the above pointers, you can ensure an improved search engine ranking for your website.