A good SEO health check should highlight any areas in need of improvement and recommendations for future optimisation. It should also identify ways to improve your website’s search engine rankings and would normally cost you some hard earn cash. To create a basic SEO health check report, use only your typing skills by following the list below:
1. Type [site:sitename.com] query into Google to find any possible penalties. If you’re coming up first great, otherwise you might be suffering a penalty which will require your immediate attention
2. Open your browser and type sitename.com (no www), if you’re redirected to www.sitename.com great, otherwise you’re running two versions of your website. For example, you’ll notice that conversioncounts.com will redirect to www.conversioncounts.com. To find any non www version of your pages in the index, use [site:yourdomain.com -inurl:www] in Google
3. Check that the server header is returning a 301 redirect response, not a 302 or 200 by testing your sitename.com (no www) version using a server header checker tool
4. If the server header does return either a 200 or 302 for the non www version, and you’re running php use this handy guide by the people at Apache to resolve it using .htacess file
5. Open your browser and type sitename.com/index.php|asp|html|etc, if you’re redirected to www.sitename.com (without /index.php|asp|html|etc) great, otherwise you might have content duplication issues as you haven’t standardized your default pages. The people at atvirante offer an automated tool to check some basic page standardization and content duplication issues which I recommend for basic testing
6. Optimising your images is essential for SEO so you’ll want to ensure all your images have their appropriate alt text, image name etc. Use Juicy Studios’ image analyzer tool to learn more about your image optimisation issue
7. Clean up your links and check that you’re not linking to infected or spammy sites by typing [linkfromdomain:sitename.com + <spammy term>] at www.msn.com.
8. Head deeper and look at one category page and one title page (or product page). If you’re seeing unique page title and description great, otherwise you’ll find it very hard to rank for the long tail
9. Are you using underscore to separate keywords in your URLs, for example, www.sitename.com/blue_widgets/? Change them to hyphens www.sitename.com/blue-widgets/
10. Check your link popularity across social bookmarking sites using an automated tool such as popuri and consider adding social bookmark buttons across the site such as addtoany.com or addthis.com
This check list should take 10 to 15 minutes to complete and will provide you with some useful information about your SEO health.