March 5th, 2010 by Mike

Whilst it is true that any successful SEO campaign must be waged with the long-term in mind if you want any rankings to last, there are several spot checks you can make straight away, in order to gauge the effectiveness of your current on page search engine optimisation. Whilst the following in combination with our free SEO tools wont tell you everything about a page’s SEO health, I hope it will at least give you a definite idea and at least help you to identity any major deficiencies.
You need to start checking every web page and making sure you’ve got the simple things in place, this should consist of a quick quality scan for of your content; you should also be looking for frequent (but not too frequent) occurrences of relevant keywords within the page title, text links and image alt tags. Also, with SEO in mind, you should ensure that your page isn’t very javascript or flash heavy, as, for example, text links will always be preferred by Google’s bots.

Once you’ve given your webpage a primary check up, you need to take a look a little more closely which should consist of a thorough content check. Here you should be looking for fresh and relevant content, often in the form of regularly updated blogs, product descriptions etc along with plenty of keyword occurrences. Whilst looking for evidence of search engine optimisation, however, be on the lookout also for some spam traits e.g. keyword stuffing (too many occurrences) or hidden text (keyword occurrences hidden from view behind images or using same colour text as background) as both these techniques, whilst potentially effective, are considered spam by Google! (When checking a site you should also check that it has an all important site-map!)

Just as elsewhere on your page you should be checking for relevant keywords in your meta-data and ensuring that your javascript functionality is can be crawled by Google’s bots – the source code is also a great place to identify and eviscerate potential spam traits.

Apart from these initial checks for your page’s current SEO health, there are also plenty of other steps you should be taking in order to ensure successful optimistaion. Apart from practical methodologies, your strategy should be based on research – therefore you should e.g. check your rival’s pages for similar keyword occurrences, with a view to bettering rather than imitating their “on-site” content.

Of course beyond these relatively simple techniques there are also a variety of SEO tools available to make analysing site data as easy as it possibly can be, including Google’s very own Google Analytics – perfect for when you just need a snapshot of your page’s optimisation or a more thorough analysis.

A good SEO company will offer free SEO analysis to help you see which SEO techniques would benefit you and any current barriers which are stopping you from getting the rankings that you want.