In the world of digital marketing, the skill of being able to get a quick snapshot of a website’s SEO is most prized. Unfortunately most digital marketers have shown reluctance towards honing this skill, yet sometimes it just takes a few tweaks that’ll make all the difference!
You don’t even need the expensive tools.
What we’re going to show you here are simple ways that will guide you in determining your own website’s health. Or your competitors. They will also help you to discover what needs to be improved on your site so as to enhance its SEO.
They are not-so intensive. They also don’t go into the itty bitty details of a full on SEO audit and neither do they delve that much into off-site SEO. The goal, though, is to show you easy ways of reviewing your website and get feedback on its SEO in a short time.
Here you go:
Find out your site’s domain authority.
The domain authority is a score off a 100-point scale, developed by Moz, to predict website’s ability to rank in search engines. It is assigned to your website depending on how well it ranks. A high score indicates more authority and the higher score the better the search results.
This metric is especially useful when comparing your site to another or tracking the progress of your website over an extended period of time.
The DA of a website is a factor of its age, SEO, linking root domains, and authoritative link backs. All you have to do is visit moz’s open site explorer, type in your site’s URL, and click the “search” button.
If your site’s domain authority is low, that’s an indication that it needs some SEO work.
Insect your site’s sitemap
Does your site have a sitemap? To find out whether a website has a sitemap or not, type its URL into Google search, leave a space, then add “sitemap.xml” for example: orangesoft.com.my sitemap.xml.
If it does not, generate one. Sitemaps indicate an organized and easily indexable site, which is good for search engines when they crawl your website. If your site has one, check on keyword usage in anchor text, number of links, and whether all important pages are listed.
Analyze the robots.txt
The essence of this is to see what’s being blocked from crawlers and what’s not and to make sure that the robots.txt file is well written. You also want to make sure that it exists. In your browser, enter the following: yourdomain/robots.txt
Robots.txt files usually comprise lists of content where spiders/crawlers aren’t allowed. An optimized site has a robots.txt file with no major content blocked. If your site lacks a robots.txt file or content crawling in major areas of the site is blocked, you have an SEO issue.
Test your targeted keywords
Finding out how your site is doing in queries is one of the simplest ways to judge the performance of your SEO efforts. Search for the targeted long tail keywords. The web is full of paid services that provide Google rank results for every keyword in real time, but we are going for the simplest and least sophisticated.
Google and count the number of search results to your website. Determine the position of your site in the search engine research results pages (SERPs). If your website appears as number one for a keyword, its SEO is excellent.
Few people care about the results on pages other than the first. Hence, if your website is not on the first page, its SEO is poor.
How fast does your site load?
Search engines are discriminative when it comes to site speeds. Slow sites rank poorly. Therefore if Google lags on your site, your SEO will be poor. To know how fast your site loads, go to gtmetrix.com, type in your URL, and click “analyze.”
Gtmetrix will analyze your site instantly and bring you the results. A slow site speed shows a need for improvement in your download speeds.
These ways will give you a good perspective of your website’s SEO. They are free, speedy, and don’t require you to purchase any subscriptions or learn any specialized skills.
*If you need help with this, be sure to reach out to our team at Orangesoft…for a small fee we’ll get your website optimised in no time.