Check if Your Website is SEO Optimised

One of the main questions we often hear when talking to businesses is whether a particular website is well optimised for Search Engines.

This is a difficult question because it all depends on what ‘well’ is. Most websites have some half-hearted attempt at on site optimisation, but often that’s just about as far as it goes.

So, before you speak to anyone, here are four suggestions from us which will help you understand if your website really has had a good start.

So, How can You Assess if Your Own Website is Optimised?

Here are our five best SEO tips that anyone can use to help them understand a site is well optimised:

1.Check Your Page Title – Homepage First, Then Other Pages

Go to your website homepage. Look up, above the content in the page to your tab bar (or top of the window in older browsers) and read what it says.

If your page title just says your brand name, or ‘Home’, or has text with nothing in particular to do with your business, then the chances are your site is not optimised.

As a second check, look at other pages on your website too. They should have different text, related to the content in the particular page, and relevant to your services or products.

2. Check Your Page Headings

The main heading in every page should be tagged as a ‘H1’. Again this is a technical term, but is important as Google sees this as the most important written content in the page, and therefore this heading should carry the most relevant keywords for your page.

To find it for your website, right click on the page and choose ‘View Source’. Once you see the source code, search for a word or words in your heading on the page to find where it is. Then look at the code ‘tags’ either side of the heading. Ideally they should say <h1>. If you can’t find them, the chances are they are images and will not be fully read by Google.

For example this page has this:

<h1>Check if Your Website is SEO Optimised</h1>

3. Make Sure Your Images Have Relevant ‘Alt Tags’

Google knows that every image placed in a site has some kind of relevance, but generally only looks at two things: where it links to (if it links at all) and the ‘Alt Text’ on the image.

So, for example, if you look at the above image in this page, then you can see that it’s ‘Alt Text’ is: ‘Is Your Website SEO Optimised’ which is relevant to the page it is on and not just ‘screenshot’ or ‘image’.

4. Make Sure There’s Keyword Consistency Across These Items

Once you’ve looked at all the above for a particular website page, then you should be able to answer a simple question.

Are these keywords consistent:in the title, in the headings, on the images and in the page content?

If not, then it may be that your site is part-optimised or the content writers have not liaised with the website developers.

5. Write a Decent Length and Write Good Copy

Finally there needs to be enough written content on the page for it to be fully indexed. If you want a page on your site to gain strong rankings, then it needs to have at least 250 words in the page. Less than this and the page will not carry enough weight.

However, write it properly. Don’t just stuff it full of phrases and keywords in the vain hope that it will perform for you. It has to be well researched and written. Pages are also checked for grammar and ease of reading and if your page is poorly written then it will suffer as a result.

Not only that, but if a page does get good ranking and traffic, then it needs to perform for you. If it’s poorly written then you won’t get the conversions you need.