5 Quick SEO checks - Is your site in good shape?

But how good is your SEO?

Here are 5 quick SEO checks you can make yourself to see if your webpage has at least the basics of search engine optimisation intact.

1. How good is your homepage title?

Here's how to check if your title looks good or not. Open up your homepage and look at the text at the very top of the screen, usually in a blue bar. This is your title.

1. The title should not start with your company name. Your company name, in most circumstances, should be at the end of the title.
2. The title should not be longer than 70 characters.
3. The first part of the title (before your company name) should be made up of phrases that you would expect people to search for. The example title above includes "PHP Web Development" because I'd like to be found for that phrase.
4. The title should read well to a person, and make sense. People will be clicking on your title in search results, so it needs to sound good.
5. If you are targeting a specific local audience, make sure you mention the location or country in the title.

If you answered yes to all of those items, then your homepage title is probably in good shape. Titles are important on every page of your site, so take the time to apply this same check to other important pages too.

2. Consistency

Start by picking the first phrase in your title, in the above example, this is "SEO".

• Does this phrase appear in the first major heading on your page?
• Does this phrase appear at least once in the first paragraph of body text on your page?
• Does your page contain a "couple" more mentions of the phrase elsewhere in the content?
• Do you use variations of the phrase in other parts of the page? A variation of "SEO" is "search engine opmimisation" or "search engine optimization".

3. www vs non-www

Here's an easy check to see if you have a duplicate content problem on your site:

Visit www.yourdomain.com
Visit yourdomain.com (note no www on this one)

Do they both work?

If yes, great. Users will be typing in both versions of your URL so you want to make sure you don't give them a nasty error message.

But the job isn't over yet. It's important that on one of these addresses, it redirects to the other. If it has been setup correctly, you should see the address bar change automatically to www.yourdomain.com when you type in yourdomain.com

To see this concept in action, try visiting capsaicin.co.nz and watch how it sends you to www.capsaicin.co.nz - this is how it should be. If your site doesn't do this, then this is a SEO problem area.

4. Nice URLs

It's now 2008, and we should all have nice URLs on our websites by now. By nice, I mean simple and logical enough to instruct someone over the phone. Or obvious enough that you could look at the address on a piece of paper and have a fair idea as to what you might find on the page.
Above: Pretty obvious as to what you might expect to find on this page right?
Above: Impossible to tell what the page is about, and not at all easy to explain over the phone.

Homepages don't usually suffer from this problem, but your important subpages might. Look through your important subpages that you want to be found by search engines and ask yourself honestly if the addresses are easy to say, and are logical.

If they are, great.

5. Tracking and monitoring

If you have to phone up your web developer and ask for the password to your web stats package (or have to ask if you even have one) then you have failed this check already.

Part of running a website is understanding how it is being used, whether your marketing spend is paying off, and looking for ways to improve it's performance. This is especially important if you are spending money each month with Google Adwords.

Google Analytics is a free website statistics package - it's free, and the detail available is great for business owners and experienced marketers alike. Every website should have a statistics package of this level installed, and should be checking it regularly.

It is almost impossible to run a successful website on autopilot. The owners, developers, and marketers need to be keeping an eye on the key metrics, and then testing, tweaking and adjusting to continue the improvements.

How did you do?

These are just the basics. If your site isn't getting most of these right, then it's likely there are other problem areas that have also been missed.

Let's get it fixed.

Capsaicin offer professional SEO reports starting from $200.