SEO Statistics and facts are good to know, especially if your Blog is in existence for more than 6 months.  These statistics help you identify areas where the blog excels and where it fails.  In this post, I will show you 5 Essential SEO Health Checks that can reveal hidden problems of your Blog.

1.  Check SEO Stats with Website Grader

Website Grader is a free SEO tool that analyzes your website and provides you with a report on the site’s marketing effectiveness. Though the term SEO appears nowhere here, the report is very detailed and provides you with lot of information on the SEO effectiveness.

Some of the key points in the generated report include:

• Page Title, Meta Data Description and Keywords – these are something that the searching engines generally look for.  Make sure these are relevant to the content of your blog.  Also the report suggests whether the Meta Description or Keywords are too long
• Heading Tags Summary – Gives you a list of H1, H2 and H3 tags used in the home page and some inner pages.  Also reports the presence of multiple H1 tags which is not a good SEO Practice
• Image Summary – Reports the number of images and missing ALT tags
• Google Page Rank and Indexed Pages
• Last Google Crawl Date – Lets you know when was the latest crawl of your blog
• Number of Diggs and Delicious Bookmarks
• Many other useful statistics…

You can check a sample report here – http://www.grader.com/site.php?URL=www.hubspot.com

2.  Check SEO further with PageBoss

PageBoss is a similar tool to Website Grader, but with emphasis on numbers.

It gives you Numbers and Statistics from a lot of sites and here are a few ones:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Twitter
• Alexa
• Friendfeed
• StumbleUpon
• Digg, etc.

You can use this report together with Website Grader to look for the grey areas.

3.  Check how your Blog appears to a Spider

Lots of essential content and keywords of a webpage may not be visible to the Search Engines, because of components like Javascript, Flash content, Images etc.

Search Engine Spider Simulator is a tool that simulates a Search Engine and displays the contents of the web page exactly how a Search Engine would see it.  This helps you understand if the Search Engines are reading meaningful content or just meaningless Javascript.

A Sample report on how a Search Spider sees a website

Here is an example of the Spider Simulator output when run on my blog.  If you see a lot of Javascript or Flash Script Tags, make sure to detect the plug-ins or theme components that are responsible for this!

4.  Check Meta Tag and Keyword relevance to your Blog Contents

Another important check is the relevance of your Meta Tags and Keywords to the content of your Blog.  Search Engines generally ignore sites which claim a few keywords but the content doesn’t go well with them.

Meta Tag Analyzer is a tool to explore the Meta Tags and Description of your blog, to give you the “relevance” metrics.  This provides a clear picture with the facts and areas of improvement.  Other useful information out of the report include – URL Analysis, Keyword Analysis and the Keyword Density.

Page Keyword Analyzer is a very similar tool that takes in – specific keywords and URL – and gives you a report on whether the site has relevant content.

5.  Check W3C Validation Status of your Blog

W3C Markup Validation Service helps you determine whether the HTML tags and the markup used in the page are valid.  This is especially a problem, if you are using some badly designed Themes or Skins.

In addition to SEO problems, bad HTML also causes display and rendering issues with a few browsers.  So make sure to identify markup problems using this tool and fix them.

These are some of the basic SEO checks, anyone can run on their blog without spending a penny.  If you are very keen about the traffic and Google ranks, you should hire a SEO Consultant.

Here are some useful posts around, on checking and improving your Blog SEO:
SEO For Wordpress – Daily SEO Blog, by Mani Karthik
Thesis SEO – For Everyone, by THE MULES
Site Clinic: An SEO Checklist for your website, by Digital Inspiration

Wordpress is well known for its plugins, when it comes to extensibility. There are many plugins around, especially to make your blog SEO friendly.

Check out this post, on the 9 SEO plugins that every blog should have. It is a nice collection of some very useful plugins.

Thanks, Darren Rowse for sharing the list with us.

Previous Posts in this series:

• Starting with SEO #1
• Starting with SEO #2 – Page Titles and Meta Tags
• Starting with SEO #3 – Anchor text and Images
• Starting with SEO #4 – Similar Posts

Over a time, any blogger publishes a good number of posts, that are around a similar topic. Generally, the link between posts are derived using the Post Titles, keywords in content, Categories and Tags.

Including Similar posts in your blog have the following two major advantages:

• Readers can navigate to and read similar posts, with ease
• Search engines can better identify the related posts, thus increasing the Internal Pagerank

As usual, Wordpress bloggers can achieve this using the Wordpress Similar Posts plugin. The plugin page has detailed instructions on how to install and get started. However there is a prerequisite of the Post-Plugin library (ZIP), that must be installed. I would better suggest to add the PHP code in the Single Post file, so that each of your post has information on the related posts.

There are quite a few options that can be configured – number of similar posts to show, the matching criteria etc.

In a related note, you can find here an interesting tip related to Similar posts plugin. It suggests a small hack to decouple the Date/Time information from your Similar posts link, so that it makes better sense for the Search engines.

Previous Posts in this series:

• Starting with SEO #1
• Starting with SEO #2 – Page Titles and Meta Tags
• Starting with SEO #3 – Anchor text and Images

Anchor text

Anchor text is a clickable text on a HTML page, that takes the user to another HTML pages either within the same site or a different site.  This is usually achieved using the <a href=” … /> HTML tag.

Better the anchor text is, easier it is for the users to navigate and simpler for the Search engine to understand the page that is being linked.

Some good practices for anchor text as per Google SEO Starter guide:

• Choose descriptive text – Avoid text like “click here”, “this” etc. for Anchor tags
• Write concise text – don’t use anchor tags for a complete sentence or a paragraph
• Format links so that they are easy to spot – avoid CSS styles that make links look like normal text
• Remember these tips while linking for internal pages too – this will help the Search engine to navigate your site better

Images

Bloggers use images a lot in their posts.  Some of these images do serve as hyperlinks, taking the user to other pages.
A HTML developer definitely knows about an attribute named “alt” in the <img> HTML tag.  The primary purpose of this attribute is to display an alternate text, if the image could not be displayed for any reason.  But with reference to SEO, the “alt” text serves some additional purposes:

• “alt” text serves the same purpose as a Hyperlink text, if the image is an Hyperlink – This helps the Search Engine to understand the target location
• Optimizing Image file names and the “alt” text makes it easier for Image search projects like Google Image Search

Again, following is an excerpt from Google SEO Starter guide for good practices with images:

• Use brief, but descriptive filenames and “alt” text
• Supply “alt” texts, especially when using images as links
• Store images in a directory of their own – example, http://domain.com/images
• Use commonly supported file types – JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP

Keep watching this space for further tips.

Previous Posts in this series:

• Starting with SEO – #1
• Starting with SEO #2 – Page Titles and Meta Tags

I have been blogging for quite some time. But only recently I was struck with the buzzword, SEO. For those of you who are unaware of this term but running a blog (and looking to popularize it!), I would like to share my learning through this series of posts.

SEO stands for, Search Engine Optimization. This means, optimizing your web page or blog, so that your pages shows up (possibly at the top!) for any relevant searches using the search engines. (I know this is a crude definition!!)

To start with, you can have a look at the video of a speech given by Stephen Spencer, in the Wordpress conference.

Once you appreciate the need for SEO, have a look at the SEO Starter guide compiled by Google. This should help the blogger optimize or fine tune his/her blog, for searches.

Stay tuned and I will share more of my learning through this series. Happy blogging!!