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SEO Step By Step Guide: 10. Website Analysis

In the past five posts, we have been discussing about various aspects of keyword analysis. This should have given a fair idea on keyword analysis and on how to select your keywords to optimize your website. It is time to move on to the next stage, which is website analysis.

You cannot just jump on to your website and start adding the SEO tags. Before you start adding the tags, you must review your website carefully to list the areas where it would require optimization. This applies to both brand new sites as well as old sites.

Factors that you need to consider while analyzing a website for optimization include the following. We will be discussing each aspect in detail in future posts, but for this post, we will just try to highlight the areas that require our attention while optimizing the website.

1.    Title of the page – Each page should have a unique title.
2.    URL structure for all the inner pages.
3.    Head tags if any for old sites including meta keywords and meta description.
4.    Website navigation and the menus.
5.    Names of the images used in the header and in the other parts of the website.
6.    Size of the images used
7.    Alt text for the images.
8.    Flash content that are used and the loading time of the flash content.
9.    Video files if any included. You should check whether the video files have the transcript of the video conversation.
10.    Audio files if any used. Here too you should check whether the audio section has the transcript available in the website.
11.    Content of each page taking into consideration the keyword density.
12.    Headings and Subheadings used in the content.
13.    Existing internal links and hypertexts.
14.    Links in the footer including the copyright information.
15.    Broken links within the site.
16.    Code standard compliance.
17.    Overall site loading time.
18.    Sitemap
19.    Current search ranks for all the keywords if you are re-optimizing your old site in all the major search engines.
20.    Search engine indexing status for all the pages of the website.
21.    Current pagerank in Google.
22.    Number of outgoing links in each page (only external links).

These are factors that you should check when you analyze your website before you start optimizing the website. You cannot browse through your website as if you flip the pages of a magazine. You must perform your website analysis in a systematic way and it should be documented before optimization. Your entire optimization process will depend on your review report. Never overlook any of the above factors considering them trivial. Noting is trivial when it comes to cutthroat competition. You should make sure that your website is superior in all possible ways so that you can stay on top of the competition. Never rush through your analysis and set a deadline for the completion of the website analysis report. If you have a massive site you can use automated tools for checking certain areas such as broken links etc.

SEO Step By Step Guide: 9. Using Misspelled Words

In this post, let us look at the usage of misspelled words for getting traffic to your website. There is still an on going debate among the webmasters on this issue. Some feel that deliberately optimizing the content for misspelled keywords is black hat trick while others say that it is not black hat trick because they are not inducing the internet user to misspell the words. Their argument is that as we get the keywords used by the internet users, misspelled words are also part of the search terms that are actually used by the users though unintentionally. There are no known Google penalties against this however. We can indeed find a number of pages that are optimized for misspelled keywords being listed in the top positions.

One of the reasons why many webmasters like to take this short cut is that the competition for misspelled keywords is lot lesser when compared to the correctly spelled words. Therefore, if you optimize your pages for misspelled words you are obviously fighting lesser competition. The most successful area of using misspelled keywords is the brand names.

There are a few factors that you need to take into consideration before you go in for this path. First of all, how would your website fair in terms of professionalism when you happen to have a number of misspelled words in your website’s content. Would it not come across to the users as a clear indication of lack of attention to details and aversion towards perfection? Yes, it will indeed have its own share of negative impact on the users. When we try to get traffic to our websites, we should also take care that our image is guarded and that we do not look like service providers who are unrefined.

However, there are a number of ways of handling it. You can take advantage of misspellings and at the same time keep your site look professional. Number of webmasters to practice this technique. All that you need to do is to add pages with misspelled words along with the note that reads something like, “Are you looking for—-?” kind of question like the one’s we see in the search results page when we use wrong spellings to make a search. By adding this additional page for some of the most commonly misspelled words and directing them to the actual pages with correct spelling, you get to enjoy the benefit of less competition and at the same time, your website also does not lose its professional appeal. This will also protect you from any search engine penalties if at all any at a later stage. By adding these pages with misspelled keywords, you are basically trying to help visitors who are looking for information using wrong spelling. Google notes that around 10% of the visitors use misspelled words while making their searches. Some of them due to typos and some due to poor spelling skills. As long as you are not compromising the professional feel of your website, you should be able to benefit from the misspelled words.

SEO Step By Step Guide: 8. Using Brand Name as One of Your Keyword

As we are still discussing matters pertaining to keywords, here is something that is worth discussing. One of the mistakes or rather should we say oversight while selecting the keyword is forgetting to include one’s brand name or company name as one of the keywords. If you look at the business websites including home based businesses, the website’s name or the domain name will be the brand name. However, now the trend is changing when it comes to medium and small business websites, the domain name is a keyword, which may or may not contain the business name in the URL.

When someone searches for your website using your brand name, don’t you think that your website should feature in the search results? If it does not come up in the first 10 results then you have very little chances of impressing your customer who searched your services using your brand name. Here we are not talking about top 10 ranking for one of your service related keywords but brand name or your company name. You will not be able to get automatic listing in the search results just because your company owns your corporate website. There should be enough reasons for the search engines to pull your website when people search for your company name. If you don’t provide compelling reasons for search engines to identify your website with your company name, then you have a long way to go in terms of brand name popularity. However, it can be consoling to hear that when you search for the official site of some of the popular brands, it is not company’s official website that shows up in the top 10 or 20 results but the sites of the affiliate marketers show up. This should not happen to your website because you cannot afford this to happen when you want to make profit out of your business.

So make sure that you use your company name or your brand name as one of your major keywords. Optimize it carefully and also use geographic qualifiers along with your company name as your keywords. This is to boost your results when people use the place name along with your business name. This is a normal search trend to club the city name along with the business name so you must take advantage of this trend. Besides that when someone happens to make a business search using Google Maps, you will be able to enhance your ranking by using the geographic qualifier along with your company name.

All the main pages are to be optimized for your company name as well and only then the service or the major products that you are selling will be associated with your brand name. This is one of the simple yet effective ways of promoting your brand name along with the product or service that you are offering.