Website Analysis Tools - Site SEO

Why use a website analysis tool? There are two main reasons to use these tools on a regular basis. First is to make sure the search engines are able to understand what your site is about and to give you an idea of what your sites strengths and weaknesses are. The second is to check out competitors sites to see where they are strong to help you get ideas on how to improve your own site.

So what do most website analysis tools show you about your site? One important thing is what the search engines are able to read on your site and what the keywords of the site are. Some website technologies effectively hide text from the search engines. The spiders (search engine programs that come to and read your site) can only read text. Technologies like Javascript and flash can hide this from the spiders. Poorly written HTML can also make it difficult for the search engines to figure out what your site is about.

A good website analysis tool also tells you how many pages the search engines have indexed of your site. Poor site navigation makes it difficult for them to find all your pages. Too many pages is a problem also. If you know that you have 100 pages on your site and the search engines have indexed 150 pages, you likely have concurrency problems; this can confuse the search engine so that they do not know which page to show in the search engine searches.

The better tools also show you how often your site is referenced in the Social networks. The major search engines use this to see how popular your site is. A good SEO program should include getting your site social links.

Next comes interpreting all this data. The data is pretty much worthless if you don’t know what it means, what to do with it, and how to change it if needed. Choose a site that is free with its information. Many sites only provide the tool to try and get you to buy their services. Most SEO can be done by the website owner if they know what they are doing. Pick a analysis tool site that helps you understand and use the results.

With this hub I will be discussing in detail some of the information you will find on these online analysis tools.

Usually the first thing that an analysis tool shows you is the sites Meta Info. While there is a lot of different metas in the head of a page, for SEO only two have high importance. The Title and Description Metatags.

Title. The title Metatag should be different for every page on the site. This tag describes or titles what the page is about. It is very important that every word in this meta has value. The title should be less than ten words and every word should count. These should be the main keywords that the page is being optimized for. It is good to use some sort of keyword program to help you decide which words are being search for the most and which words you are likely to be able to start ranking for. The most obvious words are not always the best. If it is unlikely that you will be able to outdo the sites currently ranking for those words you might want to modify them a little to make them a little more doable.

Meta Description: This is similar to the Title, but you have more room to work with. Usually up to about 255 characters. Like the Title, the description should be unique for each page. But this one needs to be more readable and should be written in a way that will entice the reader to click the link. Very often this is what the search engines display in the searches. Both of these are adjusted in the html of each webpage in the HEAD section of the code.

The search engines use the words on your page to determine what your page is about. An analysis tool will take at least the front page of your site (the most important page of the site) and count the frequency of the main words on the page. To do this the tool tries to imitate what a search engine spider sees. It takes all of the code used to build the page and removes the html and other formatting code, coming up with a list of words. Non useful words like “a”, “or”, “the” and “to” are removed from the list and the words are then counted.

What is left is what the search engines will use to decide what your site is about. When looking at the list, does the list reflect what you feel your site is about, or are the most frequently used words on your site something other than what you want your site to be about? If so, it would probably be good to make some adjustments in your text.

Other factors can affect this list. Poorly written code can confuse the spiders. Most on page php, JavaScript and CSS code should either be in the head of the page where it can easily be removed by the spiders before doing the word count or put in external files that are called (by far the most efficient manner). If this code is added into the body of the HTML it may be making it difficult for the search engine spiders to get an accurate list of words. Fortunately an analysis program will have the same problem (usually by design) and the results will show in the list it provides you. If you are getting a bunch of what might seem random letters and symbols, likely you are having some issues with poorly written code or unnecessary code in the body of the HTML.

Now, look at the pages Meta Title and Meta Description. Are the same main keywords used in the title and description. If not, once again it is time for you to make some adjustments.

One good use for these analysis tools is to help you determine if you want to link to a website. Linking to a website that Google considers to be a bad neighborhood site can have a detrimental effect on your website promotion with the possibility of getting your site delisted by the major search engines.

Most “Bad Neighborhood” sites can be easily figured out by the content. Linking to sites containing porn or other adult content, photos or videos is usually considered a very bad idea (unless you happen to have the same type of content). In addition it is advisable to be careful with any subject that is heavily spammed like pharmaceuticals (Viagra etc), ForEx, and almost anything you get hit with regularly in your email box that you didn’t ask for (spam).

Other bad neighborhood sites are a little harder to detect. They become bad neighborhood sites by the way they are promoted by their owners. Usually the easiest way to figure this out is by the index stats. If Yahoo has indexed a large number of pages and yet Google has 0 indexed, that may be a hint that Google doesn’t like the site. Similar with sites that have a high PR but only the front page or a few other pages have been indexed, likely the site has fake PR and is using shady methods to get it. While those methods often won’t get the site de-indexed it does tell you the type of work the owner does.

It pretty much comes down to, if there are numbers that don’t look right in the website analysis, you might want to do a lot more research into the site before you put your sites reputation on the line by linking to it.