Category Archives: SEO

14 Web Site Graders To Test Your Redesigned Site

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When you redesign or enhance your site, you make a lot of changes.  You change the content, the design, the front end technology, the back end stack, the user flows, the information architecture, everything.  It is tough to know what you have done right, and what needs help, particularly as it compares to other sites.  These sites can help show you what you have done right, what needs help, and how you compare to other sites.  I use them… and so should you.

  • https://website.grader.com/ – the gold standard of online web site graders. Shows performance, SEO, mobile capability, and security.
  • https://www.semrush.com/ – this site gathers a LOT of marketing information about your site… Monitor this information before and after your cutover.
  • https://validator.w3.org/ – Are you W3C Compliant?  Are you writing valid HTML?  Using this throughout your development will ensure your site is as readable and indexable as possible.
  • http://www.webpagetest.org – How long does the first view of my page take?  How about the second view?  This grader shows you both… just like the Developer Tools in Google Chrome.
  • https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ – another technical site grader that can give you guidance where to increase performance.  Be careful trying to get 100/100, though… not everything NEEDS to be done.
  • http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US – Evaluates your site down in four areas – Accessibility, Experience, Marketing, and Technology.  Still useful to get another view of your site.
  • https://www.woorank.com/ – “Run a review to see how your site can improve across 70+ metrics” – Marketing, SEO, Mobile, Usability, Technology, Crawl Errors, Backlinks, Social, Local, SERP Checker, Visitors.
  • http://www.similarweb.com/ – Another great site for a large, corporate web site.  But not a lot of information about performance.  Good to monitor usage and marketing metrics.
  • https://moz.com/researchtools/ose – Moz is known for its SEO tools, and this is an easy dashboard of information to monitor before and after your redesign.  The free version is useful, but the Pro version is even better.  Not a lot of tech help here, though.
  • http://www.alexa.com/ – 7 days for free, the paid version is the only one really useful.  Lots of marketing information is available, though.
  • http://builtwith.com/ – Very technical.  Shows you the infrastructure and software choices made by the development team.  You will be surprised.  Helpful for technology and information security teams.
  • http://www.google.com/analytics  – Free analytics tool.  Tells you who uses your site, how much, where they are from, what browsers, what time of day… a plethora of information.  Including Page Speed.
  • https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools – Free tool that shows you what index errors Google has encountered, things to make your site more indexable, and what your pages look like to the Google Search Crawlers.  Use this.
  • http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster – Everything that Search Console is for Google, this site is for Bing.

So did I miss any tools that you use?  Are any of these ones you have struck off your list?  How do you measure results of your site before and after?  Leave a comment and let me know!

EDIT: Two more sites were recommended to me that help redesign projects, so I am adding them here:

Forty SEO Checklist Items for Agile Teams

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If you are building a web site on an Agile team, you need to find ways to save time.  These two checklists will help you with that.  The first checklist, for on-page optimization, is helpful when building a new page or significantly modifying an existing one.  This is a good set-up for success criteria for a user story or sprint.  The second checklist, for on-site optimization, is good for regression testing or stabilization, and is a good baseline for success criteria for the release.

Do you have any feedback?  Things you disagree with?  Anything I missed?  Please leave feedback.

On-Page Optimization

  1. URLs
    • Readable by a human
    • 115 characters or shorter
    • shorter URLs are better for usability
  2. Head Section Order
    • Meta tags are in the right order: Title > Description > Keywords.
    • these tags are used to render the title and description in the search engine results pages
  3. Title Tag
    • 6 to 12 words , 70 characters or less
    • Unique across the site
  4. Description Tag
    • include the most important info and  keywords before the SERP cutoff
    • approximately 160 characters including spaces.
    • make it compelling – don’t want to waste your prime real estate
    • Unique across the site
  5. Keywords Tag
    • Even with the controversy of their value, include it as a best practice
    • List keywords in order of importance, separated by commas.
  6. Meta Robots tag
    • <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
  7. NoFollow prop on anchor tags
  8. View State tag
  9. Heading Tags
    • make sure your first heading tag is an <h1>,and that there is only one on the page.
  10. Canonical tag
    • rel=canonical
    • Helps prevent duplicate content within your site
  11. Hreflang
    • rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”
    • Tells Google what language to target for search purposes
  12. Images
    • Use page level keywords in your image alt attributes
    • Ensure your images have proper descriptions for Accessibility Standards
    • Alt attributes are also required to validate your HTML code.
    • Ensure file names reflect the content of the image
  13. Geo Meta Tags
  14. Overall Word Count
    • More than 250 words is recommended,
    • Quality content is key.
    • avoid duplicate content and thin content
  15. Dashes vs. Underscores in URLs
    • Underscores are alpha characters and do not separate words.
    • Dashes (i.e. hyphens) are word separators, but not too many or things could look like spam
  16. Links
    • use fully qualified links, i.e. http://www.URL.com
    • 100-200 links on a page is a good high end target
    • Make sure your link text uses keywords and is relevant
  17. Make JavaScript/CSS External
    • Ensure the most important part of your page is the first thing the  bots crawl.
    • externalize code to ensure there aren’t unnecessary lines above the body text.
  18. Make sure there are no misspellings or grammar mistakes
  19. Make sure your page is W3C valid HTML
  20. Last but not least, make sure it is relevant content

On-Site Optimization

  1. Site Map
    • Have an HTML sitemap with every page on it,
    • Every page should link to that sitemap page
    • Have an XML Sitemap to submit to search engines
    • The site map should always have fully qualified URLs.
  2. Text Navigation
    • Use text navigation, not JavaScript or Flash navigation that spiders can’t see.
  3. Pagination
    • rel=next and rel=prev
  4. Fully qualified domain
    • 301 redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com
    • Make your site available over http and https
  5. Robots.txt File
    • tells the search engine spiders what to index and what not to index.
    • Ensure XML sitemaps are listed in the robots.txt file
  6. Social Sharing
    • Make sure they are all set up and working properly
  7. Web Analytics
    • make sure you have it – GA, Omniture, etc.
    • Make sure you have only one of each analytics tag on your page
    • Ensure your analytics are set up properly – test with Fiddler, firebug, etc.
    • Monitor them regularly
  8. Server Configuration
    • Regularly check your server logs, looking for 404 errors, 301 redirects and other errors.
  9. Privacy Statement
    • An important element to Bing. It’s best practices to include one anyway
  10. Static Pages
    • Do not use more than two query string parameters
    • use mod_rewrite or ISAPI_rewrite to simplify URLs
    • use the Canonical tag.
  11. Check for Duplicate Content
    • check out CopyScape.com . Use it regularly.
  12. Find and Fix Broken Links
  13. Google Search
    • site:www.prnewswire.com
    • Home page should appear first
    • Track how many pages are indexed
  14. 301 redirects
    • Do not use multiple 301 redirects
  15. Site wide Uptime
  16. Cache your site
  17. Improve Site Speed
  18. Improve Site Performance
    • Compress images
    • Minify CSS and JS files
  19. Set Up a Google Webmaster Tools Account and check it regularly
    1. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
    2. Register all versions of your domains and subdomains
    3. Check Health ad Crawl Errors Reported
    4. Review Mobile Usability Issues
    5. Check for Manual Penalties Reported
    6. Check blocked content
    7. Ensure CSS and JS is not blocked
  20. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools as well

SEO Checklist Source URLs

Blogroll – SEO, Web Analytics, Usability, Upcoming Conferences, and Other Interesting Stuff

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These are just some of the articles I have read in Google Reader over the last month and a half that I have found interesting.  I thought maybe you would too…

SEO

Web Analytics

Usability

Upcoming Conferences

Other Interesting Stuff

Main Course – My Motorola Droid, With a Blogroll for Dessert!

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Motorola Droid

So I have traded my Samsung i760 running Windows Mobile 6 for the Motorola Droid running Android 2.0.1 code named Eclair. I am loving this phone. It is just as good as (some even say better than) the iPhone. It is fast, comes with a speaker phone, a big screen, built in wifi, bluetooth, and GPS, is based on Linux, is all open source, and is a slider so I have a physical keyboard. The hardware, OS, and software are all very finger-friendly. The Android market doesn’t have as many apps as the iPhone yet, but there are still thousands to choose from and the number is growing every day.

My Favorite Apps

The first thing I did was to connect my Gmail account to my Android phone. I instantly got my Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts synced. Then I connected the email and calendar client to my Outlook account at work. I love how the Corporate Contacts app can look up people at work without any additional information.

Plantronics Voyager Pro

I also bought a new Plantronics Voyager Pro and hooked it up to my new phone.  What a great pair!  The bluetooth connection is great, the noise cancelling works awesome, the volume is excellent… i am so glad I bought this!

Blogroll

And here are some of the great articles that i have read recently on SEO, social media marketing, and user experience.

SEO Blogroll

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I don’t usually do this, but with my recent trip to India, it might be a good idea to do a SEO blogroll post. I have found a number of interesting articles lately, and thought that I would share them with my team, particularly the developers in India. So, without further ado, here is an SEO blogroll from the last 3 months:

Whew! That was a lot of links! But the articles are really interesting, and pertain to my day-to-day job, and I thought some folks I work with would be really interested to read them too.
Let me know if I should do this more often, or if this is annoying and a waste of time. Leave me a message and let me know what you think of these articles!

Visual Thesaurus Bends and Stretches Your Way to Synonyms

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I have stayed connected to the search industry ever since I was involved with the original launch of the Pravachol web site ten years ago. One of the ways I have stayed connected is through great online resources like Alt Search Engines. This week they covered a great new online tool that helps its users search for synonyms. Visual Thesaurus displays entries in the thesaurus graphically and separates them into individual entries through a tool called Thinkmap. This is very similar to the technology used in the TouchGraph Google Browser. Both of these technologies are similar to some of the social networking graphs that are used in Web 2.0 sites. Take a look at the new Visual Thesaurus, and the TouchGraph Google Browser, and let me know what you think of the usage of thetechnology, and what other ways you might like to see it.

3 SEO Site Analysis Tools to Grade Your Site

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I don’t usually do this, but this blog entry will be about an email I received from one of my readers. I got an email from Rachel, who works at a company called SEO Site Checkup. She asked me to take a look at their site. They have created a simple-to-use web site that will analyze your site against a series of SEO based rules. All you do is put in your URL, submit, and let the site do its work. It will return a list of important fixes, recommended fixes, and successful checks. It provides a lot of information, and a great deal of next steps to make your site more SEO friendly. In fact, it was good enough to point out a few changes that we will want to make to some of our major brand sites.

To be fair, there are two other tools that I use in the web site SEO analysis space. WebSite Grader is provided by HubSpot – a company focusing on marketing for small companies. I have also used a site called XinuReturns, which will help you “Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics.”

XinuReturns focuses more on aspects outside of your site, including inbound links, search engine results, and social bookmarking. WebSite Grader gives a high level overview of lots of different aspects of your site’s SEO, both internally and externally, and gives you an easy “grade” to compare results against other sites. The strength of SEO Site Checkup over these other two sites is is that it takes a deep dive into aspects of your web site that you can change to improve your search results. It analyzes your technology and your content, and gives you an action plan for improvement. All three tools are a great way to measure your site’s SEO, but SEO Site Checkup goes the next step further to tell you how to improve those measurements.

I recommend using all three of these tools, in conjunction with analytics tools and other metrics to montiro and improve your site. SEO Site Checkup is a great new tool to add to that arsenal.

How to Redirect Like A Pro

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If you have ever redesigned, moved, or migrated a web site, then you know how important 301 redirects are. You have worked hard at building up your page rank within all of the search engines. And you don’t want to lose it. Your users have bookmarked your pages, and your partners all have links to your pages. And you don’t want those to break either.

My team and I are currently in the middle of migrating our first major site from one platform to another, and if we are successful there will be many more to come. We need to handle redirects for all the old content, the media pages, the banner advertisements, the existing client side redirects, and the internal analytics tracking pages. Here are some of the resources we are using while managing all the redirects in the site.

Are there other resources you use when dealing with 301 redirects? Do you have any lessons learned about page redirects when redesigning or migrating your site? Leave me some feedback and let me know what you think.

How Strong is Your SEO Kung Fu?

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I am by no means an expert. I work on web sites every day, and work hard at making sure that those sites are optimized from a technical and content perspective. There are a lot of good things I do, but there are a lot of things still left to learn.

It is always a good idea to benchmark your skills against others. These articles on SEO lifecycle are a great way to understand the progression of your skills as an SEO professional. And the quizzes are a great way to compare your knowledge against others in your field. Take these with a grain of salt, however. There is always a slant or twist to throw you off track. And some of these are just for fun.

20 Reasons Why DHTML Layers are Bad

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A bit of background before I dive in to the post… My team and I are responsible for developing and supporting the Brand web sites for Bristol-Myers Squibb.  The Brand Teams and external Marketing Agencies develop a concept for their site, and they deliver a fully functional version of the site in  HTML to us to implement.  We take that HTML, squeeze it into our custom content management system, and hook up all of our custom features.  This custom content platform that we call LaunchNet has built in registration management, site search, web analytics, SEO helpers, and a full suite of other tools. 

With an environment like this, managing expectations becomes essential.  Sites need to be streamlined for industrial-strength campaigns involving thousands of concurrent users and possibly millions of site users per month.  From this perspective, DHTML layers is one of the banes of development.  I have broken out why DHTML Layers make me lose my hair into 6 categories: Performance, Metrics and Analytics, Accessibility, Implementation, user Experience, and Search & SEO.

Performance

When using DHTML Layers, your users are now loading multiple pages combined into one, some of which they may not even view, wasting download time and bandwidth.  Pages are slower to download, and are slower to draw inside the browser.  Processing is now heavier on client side, and is heavily dependent on JavaScript, which is known to be a memory hog.

Metrics & Analytics

Layers are not pages.  This is a simple fact, but needs to be stated again for emphasis.  Layers are not pages.  This means that anything that is dependent on the construct of a page will break.  Google Analytics tags, which are designed to fire on page load, will need to be re-engineered to fire on layer loads instead of page loads. 

Accessibility

Mobile users on phones, PDAs, tablets, UMPCs, and other lightweight devices with web browsers will have difficulty.  These browsers are slimmed down versions of their bigger brothers, and do not have all the functionality needed to process JavaScript properly.  Cross Browser Compatibility is very difficult to implement and maintain with DHTML Layers.  You cannot bookmark a layer, either, so your users will not be able to come right back to where they were.  Popup blockers may block the use of DHTML layers, as this is a common delivery mechanism for advertising.  And, DHTML Layers could affect your site’s handicap accessibility.

Implementation

Layers on the site increase complexity, and make maintainability more difficult.  If JavaScript is turned off, any functionality to show or hide layers will not work, so your users will not see it.  Developers will need to spend lots of time to make DHTML JavaScript function with content management systems, particularly when custom functionality is delivered in this way.  And, if layers are big enough, scrolling can become an issue, as the layers may run off the page, hiding content from view. 

User Experience

User Experience is the biggest reason to implement DHTML Layers.  It adds slick new interface to the hum-drum of static pages.  But designers need to keep in mind that performance impacts user experience.  This is an “I want it an hour ago” generation, and waiting even 10 seconds for a page to load will mean your users have left and gone somewhere else.  Layers are a not a standard UI convention for web development, and some users may be intimidated by the change in interface.  And, some folks may perceive layers as “popups”, which is bad for perception.

Search & SEO

Implementing site search while using DHTML Layers is very difficult.  Most search products are page based, and as stated before, layers are not pages.  Your content might not get crawled, or may be crawled incorrectly.  Layers could also cause a problem with search engines.  Your page could end up not getting indexed, or not indexed properly.  Invisible content may also be viewed by search engine crawlers as “gaming the system” or a black hat SEO practice, and may negatively impact your page rank.

Conclusion

When implementing, DHTML Layers, think twice about the impact on other aspects of your site.  Ajax can do a lot of the same kinds of things that DHTML Layers can.  Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s new Silverlight products can also deliver great new user experiences.  All of these have benefits and drawbacks that need to be weighed before jumping in.  You may be providing a slick new experience to your users, but you may be creating more problems than it is worth.  There are lots of other alternatives to explore.