In my last blog post I started to unpack what a search engine specialist does, starting with some of the very basics. The in-depth analysis of your website is an important part of the puzzle, and one that will take up several blog posts in its own right.

 

I do an in-depth analysis of your website to tell you what needs to be changed/edited/fixed or improved.

 

Although I can do an analysis of your website without having access to your website’s administrative login and without looking at Google Analytics (if you don’t already have it set up), access to your information makes my job easier and my analysis much more in depth. Here are some examples of the things I’m looking for, plus links to more in-depth blogs about most of these pieces:

 

• Does your website have unique meta data, as in a unique title and meta description for every page?

 

• Are you using keywords that are related to your industry and what people would be searching for to find you on your pages and in your meta data?

 

• Do you have actual written content, not just pictures?

 

• Is your content written in html so it’s readable by the search engines, NOT in pictures or in flash? (Generally you can tell if your text is readable by the search engines if you can highlight part of a word on your site, even if you can’t change it.)

 

• Do you have a sitemap?

 

• Are the headings on your site formatted to be H1 tags?

 

• Do your images have keywords in the alt image tag?

 

• Is your site mobile friendly?

 

• Do your links describe what’s on the page? For example: www.website.com/aboutus is much better than www.website.com/page_id_6.

 

• Do you have any crawl errors? For example, are there certain links that are showing error codes when people click on them?

 

• Are other reputable pages linking to your website?

 

I know this is a lot, and most of it may sound like gibberish to you. In future posts, I explained what each of these means and why it’s important. Check out the linked content above for more information.