7 Ways to Check If Your Site is Optimized
Optimized SEO is essential for any small business or not-for-profit. If your website is a book, SEO optimization is its cover. It’ll protect your content from creepy crawlers and keep them from scurrying away in fright. To optimize your website for search engine visibility, make sure it has at least these three components:
- appealing title tag and meta description,
- meets keyword density standards,
- It has navigational links that are intuitive and unbroken.
These elements are essential factors in Google’s ranking algorithms. If you want people to find your site, optimize SEO. Even if you have no idea where to start or want to know what to check before you bring anyone in. Let’s go through 7 checks you can run yourself to see where your site stands.
The seven checks, at a glance
- 01Google’s website analyzer
- 02The Moz SEO toolkit
- 03Browser developer tools
- 04A quick spell check
- 05The Web Development toolkit
- 06Different ad providers
- 07A sitemap and Search Console
Use Google’s free website analyzer to Optimize SEO.
While optimizing SEO, you must know what search engines can see on your website. It sounds simple enough, but it’s easy to get lost in the jargon if you’re not used to discussing SEO. Luckily, Google’s free website analyzer does all the work for you. All you must do is enter your website address and wait for the results. If you’re optimizing your site for SEO, it’s important to know your current ranking. The analyzer will show your current ranking and whether you’re above or below the first page. To be on page one, you’ll need to work toward getting your site’s SEO up to par.
Optimize SEO with the SEO toolkit from Moz
A more comprehensive alternative to Google’s analyzer, Moz’s SEO toolkit is the way to go. You can plug in your website’s address and see a detailed overview of any issues (or successes!) with your site’s SEO and suggestions for how to fix any problems you may have. Moz offers a limited free tier, which is enough to surface the obvious problems. You can also use it to create an account and track your progress over time. Make sure you’re making progress and not getting stuck. If you want to see your site’s SEO as Google sees it but don’t know what you’re looking for, the toolkit can also help there. It has a built-in “bot” that mimics Google’s crawler. Also, it will make suggestions on how to optimize SEO and your site for its eyes.
Use your browser’s developer tools to find broken links and more.
Every modern browser has developer tools built in, and they are a Swiss army knife that can help you find issues with your website, from broken links to SEO issues. Open them with F12, or right-click any page and choose Inspect. The Console tab lists broken links and files that failed to load. The Network tab shows which requests are slow, which matters because page speed affects rankings. The Elements tab lets you read the page source, so you can check that your title tags are meaningful and not too long. (Google will cut them off after a certain number of characters.) You can also check your URL structure to make sure it makes sense and doesn’t have any missing or broken links.
Run a quick spell-check with the Spelling Tool for Chrome.
If you’re reading this article, you’re a writer. If that’s the case, you know how easy it is to miss a typo or two in your articles, especially if you’re rushing to meet a deadline. Even if you’re not a writer per se, you find yourself in a situation where you need a spell-check. You should still run a spell-check even if you think your site is excellent. After all, you don’t know what Google’s crawler sees. If you have misspelled words or broken links on your site, Google won’t show it on the first page results. You can check for spelling issues with a spell-check extension for your browser. This works for any website, no matter what browser you’re using!
Use the Web Development toolkit to find issues.
If you want to get as hands-on as possible with website’s SEO optimization, try using the Web Development toolkit. There are many features to explore. Select “Website Audit” to get a comprehensive look at the state of your site. You’ll be able to see several issues like:
- your URL structure,
- your page title and description,
- your headings,
- Your images.
Also, see your site’s crawlability and other helpful tips to make your site as accessible as possible. If you want to dig even deeper, you can also click the “Broken Links” tab to see any broken links on your site.
Photo by PhotoMIX-Company on Pixabay
Try out different ad providers to optimize SEO
Selling ad space on your own site is a different business from getting found in search. For a service business that wants phone calls and booked jobs, ad networks are a distraction rather than a revenue stream. Ad networks like Adzerk, and BuySellAds, allow you to place ads on your site in exchange for a share of the ad revenue. They also clutter the pages you most want people to convert on. Spend the effort on the checks above instead.
Optimize SEO using a sitemap and Google Search Console
If you are working through these checks yourself, it is important to keep an eye on your progress. If you don’t have a sitemap, you won’t be able to track your progress as quickly. Google Search Console lets you track your site’s progress to ensure its crawled and indexed. Also, you can add a sitemap to make that process even more accessible. You can also use Search Console as a quick way to verify your site. If you’re unsure if your site is live, you can upload your code to ensure that Google sees everything. These are just a couple other ways to optimize SEO.
Optimizing SEO has many opportunities to pursue.
As you can see, these checks will tell you where you stand. Luckily, Google’s algorithms are evolving and are now more focused on user experience. With these changes in place, the fundamentals matter more than the tricks.
These checks will tell you where your site stands. Fixing what they surface, and keeping it fixed as Google changes, is the part that takes time most owners do not have. We handle SEO for Chicagoland trades and professional services. See our SEO services, or get in touch for a free strategy session.