SEO San Jose SEO Strategies - How to Score Your Website’s SEO in 20 Minutes or Less

Many digital marketers know a lot of details about SEO, but they have trouble with the big picture. One of the most important skills you can develop is getting a quick snapshot of a website’s SEO. All it takes is twenty minutes. And you don’t need any expensive tools. You can use this step-by-step process to determine your own website’s health, to find out how your competitors are doing, and to discover what needs to be done to improve your SEO.

What I’m going to show you here is a broad overview process. This doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of a full SEO analysis, nor does it explore offsite SEO in a detailed way. The goal is quick-and-dirty pulse-taking. Here’s the process:

Step 1: Determine the site load time.
Step 2: Check for a sitemap.
Step 3: Check the robots.txt.
Step 4: Check for meta content.
Step 5: Check for H-tags.
Step 6: Check for onsite content.
Step 7: Test keywords.

Step 1: Determine the site load time

Google ranks a site high only if the site has a good load time. If your site is slow, then your SEO is going to be poor. Here’s how to know: Go to Google Page Speed Insights type in your URL, and click “ANALYZE.”

Note: A slow site speed indicates there is room for SEO improvement.

Step 2: Check for a sitemap

Does your site have a sitemap? Sitemaps are a sign of an organized and easily indexable site, which is good for SEO.

If the site is yours, you probably already know if you have a sitemap or not.
If you’re investigating a site you don’t own, type in the URL, followed by “sitemap.xml” (in some cases, you may need to type fullsitemap.xml).
If you still can’t find the sitemap, use this Google query: URL of the website, followed by a space, then sitemap.xml: www.example.com sitemap.xml
If you still can’t find the sitemap, there probably isn’t one. If there is a sitemap, that’s a good sign of SEO.

If you don’t have a sitemap, you can easily add one to your web site using web site: Sitemap Creator.

URLs with slashes are not supported in free version. To create sitemap for http://seo-san-jose.net/SEO-San-Jose-SEO-Blog/, we went to Sitemap Creator 2

Note 2: No sitemap means poorer SEO.

Step 3: Check the robots.txt

A site with good SEO will have a robots.txt file with no major disallows. You want to make sure that the robots.txt is there and that it’s not disallowing the crawlers from indexing important areas of your site. In your browser, type in [yourdomain]/robots.txt Most sites have a robots.txt file. Yours should. Most robots.txt files consist of simple lists of areas where crawlers aren’t allowed to index. Make sure that the robots.txt is there and that nothing major is disallowed. Note 3: If a site lacks the robots.txt or disallows content crawling on major areas of the site, it indicates an SEO problem.

Step 4: Check for meta content

To make sure that you have the main meta components in place, check the following:

Go to your homepage.
View the source code. In Chrome for Mac, use the keyboard shortcut: Command + Option + U. Depending on your browser, you should be able to use the “tools” or “view” menu to view the source.

Search the source code for title tag. You can do this easily by pressing CTRL + F, then typing title. The page title, if you have one, will be displayed. Search the source code for a meta description (meta name="description" content=). To find this easily, use CTRL + F instead of wading through lines of code. These are the two main meta tags that you want on your site. You no longer need to include meta keywords since Google does not use them as a ranking factor.

Note 4: Meta tags are important for SEO. A site should have them.

Step 5: Check for H-tags

In addition to having the correct meta content, you should have header tags (H-tags) as well. Good SEO means having at least one H1 tag and, ideally, an H2, H3, and H4. Use the source code view to search for each of these elements. I recommend using the CTRL +F feature to find each of these tags: H1, H2, H3, and H4.

Note 5: Having the right H-tags is an important ingredient of good SEO.

Step 6: Check for onsite content

A site needs continual, updated content in order to rank well. It’s very difficult to have sustained SEO without consistent content output.

If you’re scoring your website, you probably already know whether or not you have an active blog.
If you’re scoring a competitor’s or client’s website, it should be pretty easy to find a blog or content source. Navigate to the site’s homepage and look for a link to “Blog” or “Articles.” Content marketing is an important part of SEO San Jose, so I’ve made my blog easy to find.

If you can’t find a blog, you may want to do some more digging. Try this Google search: inurl:example.com blog The sign of a healthy blog is that it has articles that are recent and consistent.

Note 6: Healthy content marketing is an essential ingredient of good SEO.

Step 7: Test keywords

The final way to score a site’s SEO is to find out how it is doing in queries.

First, in order to gain the best results possible, make sure you sign out of Google.

Perform searches on targeted long tail keywords. There are services that provide up-to-the-minute Google rank results for any site. Since I’m giving you the free method, however, we’re doing it the old-fashioned way. Just Google and count.

You may want to create a list of keywords that you or your competitor are targeting and work through them one by one. Google SERP Position SEO Strength 1 Excellent 2 Very Good 3-4 Good 5-10 Average Page 2 Fair Page 3 Poor Note 7: To make the scoring process simple, use the chart above to help you determine the SEO strength of your site based on your position in Google’s SERPs.

Conclusion

This is a brief and simple way to get a perspective of a website’s SEO. It won’t answer all your questions, but it will give you an accurate sense of how a site is doing. The good thing about this method is that it’s free and quick. You don’t have to learn any special tools or purchase any subscriptions. You just need to do a little digging. After you do it a few times, it becomes almost reflexive to hit the keyboard shortcuts, do the searches, and check for the proper SEO elements. What are some other quick-and-dirty ways you know to score a website’s SEO? See 210 factors that will increase your website's SEO ranking in Google and in other search engines.

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