SEO Analysis

Our web site analysis experts are here to answer your one big burning question: ‘Why is my site not on Google?’ There are several possible answers, but a thorough website SEO analysis usually unearths the real reason – the text on your site is not optimized for search engines.

What does that mean? Search engine optimization – SEO – is how you get your site to the top of the search engine rankings. Simply put, it’s about loading your website with the right keywords so search engine algorithms can find your website, categorize it and promote it accordingly.

Of course, as you can guess, it’s not as simple as that. In fact, it’s a thin line between optimizing your website and getting kicked off of Google for what’s called spamdexing.

You’ve seen spamdexing in action before, in blog comments, websites you happened upon or actual spam emails in your inbox. It’s really no more than a lengthy paragraph of tangentially related keywords. If you’ve ever seen that, then you’ve seen SEO gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Spemdexing and other keyword-jamming techniques are known as “black hat SEO.” That ominous term comprises all of the really bad SEO efforts out there, which search engine algorithms have been taught to look out for and delete from their rankings. Needless to say, you don’t want that!

What you want is called, naturally, “white hat SEO.” That’s when the text on your website is optimized for search engines, but what’s written is also informative and readable to your website visitors and prospective customers.

In our experience with website SEO analysis, there are two kinds of websites – those that don’t have SEO copy, and those that have too much SEO copy. Either way, your website is not going to get the traffic it deserves.

It seems that the solution would be simply to hire an SEO writer to get your website copy up to speed. But, again, it’s not as simple as that. First you need a website SEO analysis to see where your good and bad points are on your website. That’s because it’s not just the text that appears on your website pages that’s collected by search engines – there are a lot of other elements that are weighed equally when search engines determine how your page will be ranked in search results. Let’s take a look at just some of the features website SEO analysis can tell you about:

URL/website address – many people choose the URL for their business based on the business’s name – but more often than not, the name you’ve chosen damages your search rankings. You want it to be easy to remember, but the URL is one of the most important factors in search engine rankings. Therefore, while you can keep your original URL, it may be a good idea to mirror the website onto more SEO-friendly URLs, too.

Page title – this is the word, phrase or set of keywords that appear at the top of a person’s web browser for every page on your website. For example, let’s say you owned a dog grooming shop named Pretty Puppy. You may simply have your business’s name at the top of each page on your site, but again, that’s not telling the search engines anything about your website. You can keep the business name in there, but you’d want to add more keywords that will help the search engines rank your site – for example, it could read, “Pretty Puppy – Birmingham Dog Groomer, Pet Supplies, Dog Trainers” or whatever else your business does.

Photos – almost everyone we’ve worked with on website SEO analysis forgets that photos can play a part in SEO enhancement. In fact, they can become a treasure trove of keywords, and because no one ever sees them, they don’t have to make sense. Let’s take the Pretty Puppy example again: You could have a website photo gallery of some of your finest work. Instead of keeping each photo’s original name – say, IMGP3056.JPG, which tells the search engines nothing – but no one sees this, so this is where SEO can work its magic! Each photo could have the title, the alt-text (the text that’s seen when someone mouses over the picture), the slug and the URL link optimized for search engines. You have 50 pictures on there, that’s 50 opportunities to optimize your site!

Website description – this is done on the backend (which means no one sees it on your actual website), and you’ve probably seen it on web searches. This is another chance to optimize your site. It’s usually a description of your website, no more than about 20 words, that Google brings up in a search.

Headlines – each page on your website should have a headline that’s HTML coded as such. This is yet another thing search engines look for when determining the ranking of a website. It’s easy, it’s good for your readers, and it pays off in spades.

Chances are, if you’re a first time website owner, these little things and more never occurred to you – but you’re asking yourself why your site’s not on Google. Well, that’s what we are here for! We can give you a thorough website SEO analysis, recommendations on changes to make and even provide SEO services to get your website on page one!