Hey, everybody --
I feel like Mr. Rogers when I write these. :o)
Today, we talked about how to quickly tell if a site has done 'good' SEO or not. Here's a review of the basic things you'll want to check. Have fun!
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1. View source -- search engines see your site as a bunch of code, just like what you see when you view source. Make sure you're seeing it the way they will, because some problems can be hard to spot in your regular browser.
2. Check the 'head' section:
Title -- Make sure the keyword is there
Meta Keywords -- Should have a unique, specific set of keywords separated by commas
Meta Description -- Formatted like a Google result summary, 2 lines with maybe 12 words per line (doesn't need to be split into two lines here)
Meta Robots -- Should only exist if they are trying to keep the page out of the index (not common)
3. Check the 'body' section:
H1 -- should be a title tag with the keyword in it, can be CSS formatted for style (that's redundant, if you know what CSS means...)
Links -- should follow the standard 'a href="target"'Keyword'/a' format
Content -- should be visible and in standard HTML tags like p or div -- NOT all Flash or Javascript or anything else that might 'hide' the text
4. Actual URL -- make sure it doesn't look like: domain.com/index.php?pgid=12341234&sess=1234ASDF1234&ThisIsBad
5. Check Google [site:domain.com]
Displaying results 1 - 10 of ??? -- make sure the ??? is actually the right number of pages (approximately -- it will never be exact, but it should be within 20-30% of accuracy)
:: Lots of missing pages means the crawler is having a hard time finding the whole site; best bet is a Google Sitemap, more internal linking, or removing Flash/Javascript/etc
Result summaries -- most pages should not say "supplemental result"
:: Lots of 'supplemental' pages mean the pages are not important enough to Google; most common fix is unique and meaningful META tags
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We also discussed relevance in PPC keywords -- a city name alone is often not enough for Adwords to display an ad; combine it with a product keyword, for something like Seattle Cabinets instead of just Seattle.
For a copy of today's show, send $25.00 to the following address: ... haha.