Evaluate Your Own Website

By looking at certain areas of your website, you can very easily 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.

Fast loading pages
Are your pages quick to load. If they are not the search engine may not hang around to index them. The average 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.

 

These are practices that will not only make your page nicer and more pleasant to use, but I can guarantee that employing these methods will definitely increase traffic to your site and potentially boost profits from a few simple tweaks.