In my experience, clients are often concerned about their site’s ranking, but they don’t know how to tell if their site is truly utilizing their website to its fullest capacity.

The fact is that one of the most important facets of search engine optimization isn’t the actual optimization but rather determining the current flaws in the website and considering practical and desirable goals. Perhaps even more important (and something you can start yourself, even if you aren’t a computer expert) is investigating to see if your site is in need of help (and it probably does).

Below are some of the initial steps I take when analyzing a website for a client. These are the questions you need to ask yourself. In future posts, I will discuss in more detail what exactly you want the answers to be and what you can do to get there.

On first look:

1)      Is the site text heavy?

2)      If there is a lot of text, are the keywords placed in the top and bottom of the document?

3)      Are there hidden keywords?

4)      Is the text dynamic?

5)      Is it all flash or images?

6)      Are the titles the same for each page?

7)      Are there even titles?

8)      In the titles, where is the company name placed?

9)      Is it among keywords?

10)   How many words are in the titles?

11)   Are there many links?

12)   Are they outbound? Internal?

13)   Are the links utilizing good anchor text or are they words that are not beneficial?

14)   What is the domain name?

15)   Does the domain name contain any keywords?

16)   Are there any bad redirects?

When looking at the source code/file structure:

1)      Are the images named descriptively?

2)      Do they use alt tags?

3)      Are there meta tags?

4)      Is the description tag filled out well?

5)      How many characters are in the description?

6)      Are the page links nofollow?

7)      What about a robots.txt?

8)      Is there a sitemap?

9)      Are there hidden divs?

10)   Is the site w3c compliant?

11)   Does it matter—is this messing up the site’s ranking?

12)   Is Google Analytics being used? Who’s monitoring the site’s status?

After heading over to Google:

1)      Where is the site placed for the most valuable keywords?

2)      What is the Alexa ranking?

3)      How about page rank? Yahoo… etc…

4)      What does Google Analytics think about the keyword use?

5)      What is the competition for the major keywords?

6)      What about location—are there better keywords for the business’ physical location?

7)      What are the inbound links like?

8)      What is being done to get more?

9)      Is Google Adwords being used?

10)   Does it have to be?

When considering the client (or your own business):

1)      If they had to choose ten keywords that would make them millionaires, are they practical?

2)      What kind of money/time (they’re same thing) do they have to put into search engine optimization?

3)      Is anyone on staff able to do content management/generation?

4)      Can they handle the task of learning about keywords?

5)      Who will research market trends, keywords, and client interest?

Lastly, after everything (that mentioned above and much, much more):

1)      What is the priority of each of the goals?

2)      Are they practical, and what do we do if not?

3)      What kind of return on investment are we looking for?

As you can see, it’s really not as simple as thinking about valuable keywords and color schemes. In fact, the major questions come lower on the list, which ask if the proposed methodologies are realistic and beneficial.

Don’t let this discourage you, though. SEO is a lot of work, but it is worth it, and the results do come. In fact, not all of the issues need to be resolved immediately—any progress can have dramatic results on your site ranking.

As a short anecdote, I have been working (as I mentioned before) with an established web-based company just north of Los Angeles (Santa Clarita—Valencia, California to be exact) for the last month or so. These questions were the first that I considered when beginning to take them on as a client. The answers have directed our work thus far, and they still help us keep on our goals. Proper analysis is invaluable from start to finish.

Good luck on your quest for first page rankings.