A Typical SEO Evaluation

This week, I did an SEO evaluation on a potential new client's site. The things I found were pretty common mistakes, so I thought I would genericize the situation and offer them here. The purpose is to give you some things to look at if your own website (or a client's) is struggling in the search engines.

This evaluation took about 2 hours, and focused only on the site's ability to enable indexing. I'll break it down into the 4 main issues I found, and some simple, cost-effective solutions I offered.

Issue 1: Page titles and meta data were all the same across the board. What it looks like to me, was the site builder created the html header for one page. He then simply copied it into all of the other pages as he built out the site. This can be a good way to build sites from scratch, but the specific information in the head tags needs to be changed prior to launch.

• SEO Solution: Use unique description, keyword, and title tags. Focus on a pre-researched list of primary, secondary and tertiary keywords. Lay out a spread sheet with all of the pages and their specific content for each tag. Each page should have a unique, hand created and strategically focused set of meta data.

Issue 2: No alt attributes used in image files. Across the whole site, not a single image I found had an "alt name" attribute assigned.

• SEO Solution: Add alt attributes to the html tags for every image. This markup is to enable users who are visually challenged to still "read" the non-textual parts of your website. It is referred to as "Section 508 Compliance." The use of keywords here is not as important as describing the image accurately.

Issue 3: No Site Maps.

• SEO Solution: Add site maps. Generate an XML site map as well as an html site map that is accessible to the user. If applicable, create an RSS feed. Site maps are not guarantees that every page within them will be indexed. But site maps do tell the search engines what you want them to look at, and they do often help a site get more thoroughly indexed.

Issue 4: No Method of Measurement Being Used. The site owner really has no idea what is happening on the site--who visits, what they are looking for, what they are doing. There are some potential e-commerce opportunities being missed, and the call-to-action is muddled and soft across the whole site.

• SEO Solution: Add tracking and increase visibility and accountabilty of all calls to action. Set a baseline so there is an achievable, measurable goal.

There were other issues in the execution of the site that offered chances for optimizing, but these simple steps above were enough to get them started in the right direction.

From my end, it is pretty easy to optimize these things and make sure the site is getting properly indexed. As an SEO writer, it is important to always do this before doing anything else. It is truly eye-opening to see how many times these relatively simple things can improve a site's ability to gain organic SEO power.

And then the fun can really begin!