I am routinely amazed by the number of phone calls I receive that ask me to detail my SEO methodology. The fact that businesses ask what SEO entails is not what amazes me, rather it’s that they believe they can solve the issues themselves with no experience in search engine optimization (I’ve performed SEO services for 8 years and continue to learn new tricks daily). To objectively evaluate you website’s SEO score the following list details some of the items we investigate.
The initial external SEO investigation looks at:
- Your current SEO scores. Your current SEO score is shown at http://www.whois.sc and at http://www.websitegrader.com
- We evaluate your historical traffic pattern with http://www.alexa.com
- Is your site hosted with a static-ip.
- Do you have mirrored sites with alternate designs and content.
- We’ll start by looking at the code used to generate your page. Is your HTML obscured by either a table based layout or PHP code, or is it correctly built using CSS.
- We evaluate your page titles against https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal;
- The page title is what appears on line one of the search results page. Ideally it should only contain 70 characters, including spaces. Many firms use fewer than 70 characters but if you use more than 70 characters you are penalized.
- We evaluate your metatags. The only metatags we focus on is the keywords and description. Keywords are words you want search engines to recognize that if a user types those key words, your website appears. The description is the text that appears on lines two and three of the search results pages. Google claims they do not evaluate metatags but we remain skeptical. Yahoo and Bing both acknowledge their algorithms look at metatags. Again as with page titles, too many words is not helpful and too few is less than optimal. The most common metatag error is to use a comma and a space between search phrases, or to use letters in Title Case.
- We evaluate your use of html headings. Most of the sites we encounter fail to correctly organize information using the Heading1, Heading2 and Heading3 HTML tags. Those that use heading tags fail to realize the use of keywords there must mirror keywords in the page title.
- We evaluate your copy for spelling, grammar, readability, and effectiveness. Believe it or not, your website is ranked for readability – what level of education is required to understand your offering. If your page requires a PhD to understand your SEO results will be sub-optimal.
- We evaluate your keyword density. Search engines look at the total and unique number of words on the page.
- We evaluate the number of hyperlinks on your site, both internal and external, and if your hyperlinks correctly use fully qualified domain names.
- We evaluate the number of backlinks to your site, hyperlinks from others sites that point to your site.
- We evaluate your use of images. Alt tags are text that describe images to physically handicapped visitors. Failure to include Alt tags penalizes your SEO score. (If you have a single image called spacer.gif – a layout fixer – your website needs help).
- We evaluate your social networking on sites like Facebook, Twitter, other social media sites.
- We look to see if you use a wordpress Blog both internally and externally.
- We look for a sitemap and a press release page. Your press release page should contain PDFs with metatags.
- We look for a contact form and test to see if it is working and how long it takes you to respond.
- We evaluate if you are using a press release service to keep your audience informed of your businesses latest developments.
The initial investigation will take about one hour to perform, and we’ll produce a report of our results with specific recommendations and the time required to implement those changes.
If you decide to work with a NYC SEO Expert our next phase requires an internal SEO investigation (for which we will sign a non-disclosure agreement). Our internal SEO investigation looks at your website’s log files. Log file analysis requires that we mine data such as what search phrases brought visitors to your website, how long did they stay, how many pages did they look at, did the visit result in a contact, and more. The internal SEO investigation will take 2-3 hours to complete.
Contact an NYC SEO Expert today at 212-828-7089 to learn more.
