If you are running or working for a business then chances are you do not have a lot of time to spend figuring out if your site is SEO optimized in a satisfactory manner. However, SEO has now become a very important aspect of increasing the amount of traffic your site is able to generate, so it deserves at least a little bit of your time.
At first, it may seem like analyzing the SEO of your site is a very time-consuming task, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you know what you are doing, you can easily check all of the important SEO aspects, and get a clear idea about what you can do to improve the optimization of your site within just one hour.
Here, we will take a look at the most important aspects of SEO optimization. We will see how you can analyze each aspect and the tools you can use to make the process quick and painless.
Content
Content is the most important aspect of SEO optimization. It is the first thing that search engines check to see if you are providing informative content that is relevant to your chosen keywords. Sites that tend to feature higher on searches have images in their content, along with plenty of well-written information. It also helps that all the content is linked to an author page and that it contains some alt text with the images. Having links to sources with a good reputation also helps raise the popularity of your content.
When you want to check the quality of your written content, then you should use tools like Copyscape to make sure that it is completely original and hasn’t been copied from somewhere else. It also helps you avoid any instances of plagiarism when you are quoting or mentioning something from a different source.
Backlinks
Backlinks are also considered one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization and are something that should be taken seriously. If you have plenty of good sources linking to your site then this will help boost your SEO. Some sites make deals with others so then they can create backlinks to each other. This is perfectly fine, as long as both you and your colleagues use the links in relevant content and not just randomly in an attempt at keyword stuffing. You should also make sure that you have a few links inside anchor text, which is most commonly found in calls to action at the conclusion of web pages. You’ll most commonly find these on any landing pages you have.
Majestic is quite a good online tool for checking your backlinks. If you find that your backlinks are not working to your satisfaction, then it probably means that you need more anchor text, and you need to get more sites using your web pages as sources. You should also make sure that all of the links that are being used to your site are all inside relevant information, otherwise, this will harm your search engine ranking as well. With tools like Majestic, however, you should be able to get all the details about the backlinks for your site quickly and easily.
Site Speed
While this isn’t currently one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO optimization, it is something that is becoming more vital. Search engines are now starting to use it more often when creating their ranking algorithms, and it’s also becoming more important for user satisfaction.
Microsoft IIS has an online tool made especially for Google page ranking that checks the speed of your web pages, informs you of what may be slowing the page down and how big a priority it is. This then gives you a great opportunity to prioritize the problems you have with site speed. In some cases, you may find it is something as simple as an image that is large and is taking a while to load. In other cases, it could be a server issue that needs a little work to put right. In any case, it will help you figure out which of your pages are loading at a satisfactory rate, and which need a little more work.
Meta Data
Mistakes with metadata are probably one of the more common problems that websites have. Some people think that uploading content with a good title is all they need to do, when in fact they need to create good metadata in order to show the search engine that you have relevant information based on the keywords you have selected.
Screaming Frog is a good downloadable tool that puts all the information about the SEO optimization of your site into a spreadsheet, and then lays all the information you need out for you. It can give you clear numbers about your metadata, showing you which pages have no meta descriptions at all or descriptions that are too long or short. With this information in hand, you can easily spend just a few hours going back over the pages you have to improve their metadata. This is important if you want people to be able to find some of your older posts easily.
Title Tags
While you are using Screaming Frog, you can also use it to make sure that all of your content has relevant titles. This is very important and is something that is often stressed during page checks when using systems like WordPress.
Having an H1 title in your content is very important, and it should contain at least one of the keywords you are using for that page. Again, Screaming Frog will provide you with the pages that are missing H1 titles so then you can go back and add them. This is a nice simple way of improving the SEO optimization of your content quickly and with very little hassle. It is however important that you make H1 titles a force of habit in the future when you are making new content.
Using the tools mentioned above you can get a clear and detailed report on the SEO optimization of your site. With this information, you then have the chance to prioritize what needs changing and how you can make sure your future content needs very little editing. In just an hour, you can figure out everything about the SEO of your site, thus saving a great deal of time and effort.
