Evaluate Your Own Website
 by: Neil MacLeod


By looking at certain areas of your website, you will be able to determine why it isn't performing as you would expect, or, improve the performance it currently has in the search engines.

What is the title of each page.

The title of your page can be seen in the top left hand side of your browser.

The title of each page should relate to the information on the page and be unique for each page. The title is a very important part of the web page and must be treated accordingly.

Descriptive Meta Tags

The Description meta tag is normally used to describe your listing in the search engines. It is important that this description entices people to click on your link. It would not be beneficial to have the same listing description for each page. Make each page description unique.

Content

Unique content is king. The more relevant content you have on your website the better. Always bare in mind the topic of that page and ensure that the page title, paragraph headings and text relate to that topic.

The content should be well written and semantically correct. Headings actually have an order within the code, so ensure that this rule is used.

It is the content that will be catalogued by the search engines and this is how they will understand what each individual page is about.

Do you have a sitemap?

It is important that the search engines can see all your pages. A good way of doing this is to add a sitemap which is accessible from the homepage. This sitemap will list all your pages by the topic of that page allowing a search engine to find every single page on your website. Are you sure that all of your pages are listed in the search engines?

Navigation links

Ensure that your menu links contain the text of the topic or page they are linking to. Do not forget the links that are within your content. Try and use relevant text with your content to link to other pages within your website.

Dynamic page names

Search engines have difficulty reading sessions (sessions are codes appended to the web address to identify users on the website). If you have session variables on your site, search engines may not index your pages. Are naming conventions used for your folders and files on your website. E.g. www.mydomain.co.uk/keyword.html? If you have keyword phrases are the individual words separated with hyphens?

Also, does Google see your site twice (this is bad!) ?? Does http://web-studio.co.uk automatically goto http://www.web-studio.co.uk ?

Fast loading pages

Are your pages quick to load. If they are not the search engine may not hang around to index them. The avrage age size should be less than 110Kb. If it is not then it is important to identify what is increasing the size of the page and correct it.

Web Standards

Have you updated your website to the latest web standards. The Internet is a forever changing media and standards have been suggested by the World wide web consortium (www.w3c.org) . By rebuilding a website using the latest standards we have the ability to separate the content of the website from the presentation (design). Benefits of this include being able to supply search engines with clean text, not blurred by coding. Also the ability to change design more regularly becomes affordable.

Disability and Discrimination Act

Does your website comply to the DDA. Are blind people able to "hear" your website if they have the correct "reader". What about the partially sighted? Ensure that all of your images have labels correctly added to them (known as alt tags). Can people easily change the text using the browser text size facility?

Summary

These are on site areas to look at and will allow the search engines to determine what your site is all about. Never forget the need to look at off site promotion!

About The Author
Neil MacLeod runs http://www.web-studio.co.uk/ providing web site and web marketing services in Buckinghamshire. Neil has been building websites since 1999 and is a founding member of http://www.itwebnetwork.co.uk.