Every day, our software analyses your site. We have split this analysis into 3 distinct areas covering SEO Ranking Factors, Site Factors and Content Factors. These by no means cover every aspect of what’s important for good SEO; but they are useful to give you a quick and easy way of checking how you are faring and to make sure you have the SEO basics covered.
This looks at various factors including the significance of your domain name, your ranking power and your link popularity. Each area is outlined in a little bit more detail below:
| Domain Name | .com |
| Keywords in domain | Y |
| Domain age (years) | N/A |
| Page Rank | 3 |
| Alexa rank | 0 |
| Inbound Links | 0 |
| DMOZ | 0 |
| Yahoo Directory | 0 |
| Total Score | 5 out of 8 |
Please do not get too caught up in the score. It’s just a guide to say how well you are doing and to help you focus on getting absolutely every aspect of your site right for users and search engines.
Depending upon your target market and what type of business you are, you ideally want a TLD (Top Level Domain) for the market you are targeting. For sites in multiple languages this is not the only option and there are plenty of alternative ways of structuring your site in a user and search engine friendly way with sub-domains, sub-directories and so forth.
Have a nice and short and relevant keyword or keywords in your domain is a proven and simple way of getting your site to rank well for a handful of important phrases. Clearly, finding a suitable domain name may be much more difficult. But you can always try and buy one (if you do, be sure to check that it has not got a poor spammy reputation that will be hard to shake off).
We look to see if any of your campaign keywords appear in your domain name. If you have not configured any campaign keywords yet then this will default to ‘No’. Clearly, your domain name may reflect your brand, company name or product name (which are all fine); but it is sometimes useful to look at your competitors to see if they rank for certain keywords because they have a domain name that incorporates one or more generic keywords.
The age of your domain may have some influence on your ranking. There is some debate about this amongst SEOs and rather than reiterate that here; why not check-out Ann Smarty’s excellent summary here.
There are lots of articles written about the importance and relevance, or not, of Google's Page Rank algorithm.
We're not going to repeat all that here; suffice to say it goes on a sliding scale from 0 – (new site) to 10 – (Global Supersite) and just because your page rank goes up or down from time to time does not mean that you will see a corresponding increase or decrease in your search engine rankings or site visitors.
It is really only useful as a general indication about the quality of a site; and we use it when looking for potential partners online to prioritise our workloads. Don’t get too worried about it; sites with lower Page Ranks often rank higher for certain keywords than sites with higher Page Ranks.
All this being said and done, we'd rather have a GPR of 10 than 3; who wouldn't?
If you want to check the Page Rank of a site whilst surfing the web, then download the Google Toolbar.
Alexa is a useful tool used to rank web site traffic and it can provide a useful rule of thumb guide to how your website stacks up against all your competitors. The lower the Alexa ranking number the greater the number of visitors a site has. These rankings are generally consistent with the order amount of traffic a range of sites.
We report on the number of links from other websites to your website compared to your competition. As you probably are well aware, good quality links with relevant (anchor) text from quality websites help your cause.
We do not stop at Yahoo Site Explorer to find the quantity of links to your site; we also use a number of other services to find as many links as possible. This data is updated daily.
For link building purposes, we also validate the links that are reported to us, by visiting the website and checking they are still live.
Everyone talks about the importance in getting a free listing in this human edited web directory as it is a quality human edited website directory of websites.
It is free to submit your site and it is one of the most useful directory sites you can submit your website to. This is because it is a human edited and trusted source of links and is used by many leading sites for their directories or to help them compile their indices, including Google.
To submit your site, first read the instructions on this submit URL page.
You need to search the Open Directory first to identify the single best category for your site. The Open Directory has an enormous array of subjects to choose from and you should submit a site to the single most relevant category only. There is no guarantee the site will be listed but it is definitely worth spending 5 minutes to apply.
If you plan to pay for a listing in Yahoo, then there are 2 options and you can do either or both.
The Yahoo Directory is a quality human edited directory of websites and it currently costs $299/year for non adult sites. Rumour has it, a listing here gives your search engine ranking a nice boost in the right direction! Pay to list your site in the Yahoo Directory.
To quickly include and update your web pages in Yahoo! algorithmic search results visit Yahoo Search Submit Basic Subscription. Yahoo charges $49 per URL and you can submit a maximum of 5 URLs per domain into the program.
This looks at various technical and structural factors affecting your site’s ability to rank well in the SERPs and to delight users. Each area is outlined in a little bit more detail below:
| Robots.txt | Y |
| HTML sitemap | Y |
| XML sitemap | Y |
| Friendly URLs | N |
| Custom 404 page | Y |
| Page load time (ms) | 219 |
| Total Score | 5 out of 6 |
Please do not get too caught up in the score. It’s just a guide to say how well you are doing and to help you focus on getting absolutely every aspect of your site right for users and search engines.
This alerts you if your site has no robots.txt file or it is incorrectly configured. A properly configured file can help you direct search engines that obey the Robots Exclusion Protocol to the important parts of your site and can stop them indexing content that you do not want indexed.
We check for your robots.txt file as part of our daily healthcheck and we will automatically flag the Create Robots.txt task as complete in your task pad once your developer has put one on your site.
It is not a big job and should take any decent developer less than half an hour to write this for you - unless you have a huge site!
You will find further advice and information about robots.txt files here http://www.robotstxt.org/.
An HTML sitemap is simply a list of pages on your site, usually nicely ordered and sometimes with useful descriptions.
It is useful for users to help them find exactly what they are looking for as well as for search engines who can follow all these links. Your site really should have one. It is normally on its own page called /sitemap.html, or sitemap.aspx or similar. But is could be called something else!
If we couldn't find your HTML sitemap automatically it does not necessarily mean you do not have one; it may be because your developers have called it a funny name, given it a funny file extension or not put it in an obvious place.
We automatically check all the usual names, file extensions and standard locations for this file; so if it is not there and you definitely have one then please use the site feedback form and let us know what your file is called.
If you are not sure then ask your website developer whether he has created one, if so what is it called and if not why not! Then ask him to create one for you. It is not a big job and he should not charge you a lot unless you have a huge site.
You can break up sitemaps into different segments for different parts of your site and we currently recommend no more than 10,000 pages per sitemap. Need some professional SEO help.
We check for your HTML sitemap as part of our daily healthcheck and we will automatically flag the Create HTML Sitemap task as complete in your task pad once your developer has put one on your site.
Am XML sitemap is also a list of pages on your site but it is created in a format that can be used as an automatic feed to inform search engines and people of new, amended or deleted pages on your site.
There are web standards that the search engines expect your XML sitemap to be in and you can find them here http://www.sitemaps.org/.
The beauty of a properly configured XML sitemap is that it automatically tells the search engines that your site has changed and gives them a complete list of pages. Whilst it won't change your search engine rankings overnight it may go someway to helping ensure your site is properly indexed.
If we couldn't find your XML sitemap automatically it does not necessarily mean you do not have one; it may be because your developers have called it a funny name, given it a funny file extension or not put it in an obvious place.
We automatically check all the usual names, file extensions and standard locations for this file; so if it is not there and you definitely have one then please use the feedback form on this site and let us know the file extension of your file.
It is also worthwhile submitting your initial sitemap once created to the search engines directly in their Webmaster Tools accounts of by pinging them with your feed.
If you are not indexed and you have not submitted your site to the search engines before then do this now by clicking on the relevant task on the ‘Things To Do’ task pad.
For detailed instructions on how to ping your XML sitemap feed click here.
We check for your XML sitemap as part of our daily healthcheck and we will automatically flag the Create XML Sitemap task as complete in your task pad once your developer has put one on your site.
Content Management Systems that produce SEO unfriendly long URLs with lots of unnecessary parameters confuse search engine robots, this can cause them to end up indexing multiple versions of the same page on your site or not indexing your site properly at all.
This impacts your SEO Campaigns because your best content is probably not getting indexed properly. Your page trust and rank can get diluted amongst a number of almost identical pages and you might find it harder to rank for generic keywords as a result. It is also a waste of resources from a search engine's perspective and as it will only allocate a certain amount of time to indexing your site ('crawl equity') then some of its efforts may end up being wasted. Ideally your site URLs should be short and contain keywords that are relevant to the content on the page (but do not over do it).
This will have a positive effect on your ranking for these keywords. It is best practice to use a hyphen not an underscore as it is more likely the search engines will treat your words as two or more separate words as opposed to merging them together. We advise keeping URLS as short as possible and as close to the home page as possible.
Do not over use: query parameters, hyphens or underscores, keywords, folders or special characters of any kind. As technology moves on so fast, we also recommend not using file type extensions for your pages, e.g. /products.htm, /products.html or products.aspx. This way if you change your technology you should not have to re-write or re-direct all your URLs.
Conventionally, most servers are configured to tell a user or a search engine when a page is not found (with a 404 error). If you adopt this approach you can then customise the error page with any or all of the following: your own friendly comment, a link to your home page, other related links, a search form and a site map to help the user or search engine continue their search.
It is important to check this works properly for a number of reasons the most important of which is the user experience but it is also helpful for search engine bots as you stop them from getting to a dead end.
To test whether your site has a Custom 404 error page and what happens when someone incorrectly types in a URL or is lead to an old deleted or moved page then simply type some gobbledegook after your domain in your internet browser and see what you get. e.g. www.example.com/fdsgfjewkgkl.
If you get a nicely formatted page with some helpful links to the home page, sitemap or key pages then you are fine; but if you get an Internet Explorer error page or similar then you really should ask your website developers to change this for you.
If you get redirected to your home page this is not necessarily a good thing as depending upon how this page redirect is configured you (e.g. With a 200 Status OK message) could be giving misleading information to search engines and we have seen this cause significant duplicate content issues.
Your web developer should always redirect obsolete pages on a one to one basis if possible to the most relevant new page with a 301 permanent redirect; this ensures any user who has bookmarked an old page will find a new one, and that search engines will pass the link value of the old page to the new page so you do not hurt your search engine rankings or authority.
We check for your Custom 404 page as part of our daily healthcheck and we will automatically flag the Create Custom 404 page task as complete in your task pad once your developer has put one on your site.
Clearly to be successful online you want to create the best possible user experience. One key factor is how long your home page takes to download. For this reason we compare your server response time against your competitors.
People do not want to hang around and there's billions of alternative websites out there for them; so do not give them an excuse to leave before they have even got to your content.
Ask your developer to streamline your home page as much as possible by reducing and optimising images, removing redundant code and looking at your hosting infrastructure and server load as your visitors and usage grow.
If it takes more than 5 seconds to download your home page - then think again about the design of your home page.
We monitor this for you on a daily basis - and can alert you if the performance worsens or is slower than a target you set. Check your notifications in Settings.
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on and you can download it here or you can also use Google’s Page Speed plug-in.
This looks at the structure of the content on your site and how well indexed your site is in Google. Each area is outlined in a little bit more detail below:
| Descriptive page titles | Y |
| Descriptive H1 headlines | N |
| Duplicate page titles | Y |
| Duplicate page descriptions | Y |
| Alt tags in images | Y |
| Pages crawled by our spider | 74 |
| Pages indexed in Google | 79 |
| Total Score | 4 out of 7 |
Please do not get too caught up in the score. It’s just a guide to say how well you are doing and to help you focus on getting absolutely every aspect of your site right for users and search engines.
This checks whether your page titles are descriptive in nature. You can download the majority of your site’s meta data on “Tab 3 On-Site Optimisation”.
This checks whether your main page heading (H1 tags) are descriptive in nature. You can download the majority of your site’s meta data on “Tab 3 On-Site Optimisation”.
This checks whether your page titles are duplicated across your site. You ideally want this content to be unique and relevant to every page on your site.
If they are duplicated you can download the majority of your site’s meta data on “Tab 3 On-Site Optimisation” so you can fix it.
This checks whether your page descriptions are duplicated across your site. You ideally want this content to be unique and relevant to every page on your site.
If they are duplicated you can download the majority of your site’s meta data on “Tab 3 On-Site Optimisation” so you can fix it.
This highlights whether your site contains images without alt tags. This is both important for search engine ranking, but is also best practice to cater for the needs of all types of user. You can see this report on “Tab 3 On-Site Optimisation” so you can fix any images that need amending.
The number of pages on your site our crawler found when it tried to index your site. This is helpful way of gauging how many pages your site has that are accessible to search engines. It is an alternative to counting the number of pages in your sitemap or other methods.
This displays the number of pages Google is reporting in its index. It is useful to compare this with the number of pages on your site (as found by our crawl or your sitemap) to identify whether all key pages are being indexed and to highlight pages that need internal or external links to be indexed better. It is also useful to help highlight problems you may have such as duplicate pages in the search engines.