August 16th, 2010 by Mike

What a gift it would be to see ourselves as others see us. Fortunately, it’s easier from an SEO perspective than it is in life outside the internet. Examining the way your website works from an SEO point of view is an extremely useful thing to do if you’re thinking of making improvements to try to get onto search engine results pages. Any good search engine optimisation company will provide a detailed and thorough service, but you might want to take a long hard look at the site yourself first. This will give you a good idea of where you might be going wrong, and what exactly you want an SEO agency to do for you.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s only publishers whose sites are obviously failing on the results pages that need to improve SEO. However successful your site is, there’s a very good chance it could be performing better given some optimization.

If you’re wondering what to look for when examining your site for flaws, don’t despair. We’ve put together a list of ways in which you can approach self assessment for SEO.

Have a Look at How You Currently Rank and for Which Keywords

Search for your product or service from all the big name search engines and see where you appear on results pages. If you rank well with one of them and not others, it’s a good idea to look at the criteria they have that’s different from the others.

Basically any information is useful. Make notes about keywords that are leading people to your site, and potential variations of the words preceding or following them. Thinking with SEO in mind means being open to new ideas and actively using your imagination.

Fresh SEO tools are there at your fingertips if you look closely and use your imagination. It is very likely that acting the part of a user finding your site will reveal ways in which you can improve.

Run Google Analytics for a Couple of Weeks

Don’t know what Google Analytics is? It’s a range of tools provided by Google to help you learn more about your place on the web. You can track visitors to your site and compile useful statistics. Running Google Analytics can give you an overview of the big picture, and show you where you’re succeeding and where you’re going wrong.

Read Your Content from a User Perspective

It’s well known that we often lose sight of the wood when surrounded by trees. In a similar way, you might be obsessed with the content on your site and still get it completely wrong. One of the best free SEO tools is fresh and original content. How sure are you that it’s a description of what you have on your pages? Take some time to access your site from a user perspective and read the material as if it were on another site. If it’s impossible to wear the shoes of an objective visitor, find one and study their reactions. You might be surprised by which things you thought were good actually receive a negative response, and vice versa.

Check Your Links

Think about your site with good link building in mind. How many of the links on your pages are unnecessary or irrelevant. Try to think like a user again, and follow the links to see if the sites they lead to are, in fact, any good. You might even find that some of them are no longer valid, and broken links make for a shoddy site.

And Finally, Get a Good Search Engine Optimisation Company to Do Most of the Work for You

Having taken a good look at your site and where you’re going wrong in SEO terms, don’t try to fix everything yourself. Bear in mind that without the necessary experience you could easily make things worse rather than better, by overfilling pages with new keywords for example.

Remember that good SEO is an investment in future prosperity, and that the returns on that investment can be better than you’d ever imagine. The internet reaches millions of people every day, and search engines are a powerful tool in bringing users to your pages. Without them acting as intermediary, showing the way to pages, you wouldn’t receive traffic and without it, no more business. Think big and shoot for the stars. You might be surprised how far you go!

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.