There are a few simple things you can do to scan your own website to get an unbiased evaluation of it's quality and findability (SEO).
First off let's look at quality. W3, the organisation responsible for setting the standards for websites, has an online scanner: http://validator.w3.org/
Just enter your full website (including the http://) into the address field and press [check].
The first thing we see is either a red bar stating that errors were found, or a green bar stating it was successfully checked. Needless to say, red is bad. How bad will depend on how many errors are listed in the "Result" row.
Next you should look at the "Doctype" row. This could have many settings. Currently the latest, and best, setting is "xhtml 1.1". "xhtml1.0" strict would also be acceptable but anything else means the code of your site is old and most likely not fully compatible with all browsers, one of the reasons you may have a red bar.
Now look at the Result row again, warnings are bad but less important. Errors are going to give a rough idea of the quality of your website. If the Doctype is not xhtml and you have 0 errors (or a green bar instead of red) then your website is likely programmed to great quality standards, but it is either an older website, or the programmer chose to use an older programming standard which they are very proficient at. Either way updating to a new standard would improve your website's quality even more and if you passed with an older standard it may not even require that much work.
If your Doctype is xhtml and you have up to 10 errors your website is still good quality. But the programmer used some short cuts to get the final result. These could be fixed to further improve quality but most likely you will not notice much change. 10-20 errors: you should have a professional check your website to make sure none of the errors are too serious. Most errors are easy to fix and can improve your website's performance. With 20 or more errors you should really have someone look at your site's code and evaluate where the most pressing issues lie. It could me that much of the errors are in the content of your website and not the building code, but this many errors could mean that your website performs not as expected in certain browsers.
Next are some simple findability checks. By no means do these give a full evaluation of your site's findability as so many complex algorithms are applied by search engines in this area but these checks can certainly show some areas that could need improving or show that as far as the code is concerned what could be done, was done. Checking this will require a little digging and browser your site's code so first off lets open your site and go to a page you wish to check. This could be your homepage or it could be a content page. Once on the page go to the menu "view" in your browser and select "Page source" (FF) or "Source" (IE).
Now the first things you want to find and check will be some lines of code at the top of the page, see if you can find them. If you run into this text: "<body>" without finding them then your site probably does not have them at all (which is bad). Incidentally any code that starts with < is called a tag. "<body>" is the body tag. We will be looking for a "<title> tag and some "<meta>" tags with the name "keywords", "description", "author" and "content-language". See if you can find them. If you can find the title tag it should have the informative name of the page you are looking at in it. Ideally in a well structured sentance. For example: "Here you can find all contact information for companyName" on the contact page. The max characters for this title is 60, your title should not be longer than this. Now look for the 4 meta tags and make sure that the part of the tag that starts with "content=" is followed by proper text. For the keyword meta tag you should see 4-8 comma separated unique keywords a couple of general ones for the whole site/company and a few specific for this page. In the description meta tag you should see max 160 characters in a short description of the current page. In the author meta tag you should see the name of the owner of the website, your company name for example. The content-language meta tag should show the language of the website, this will be in a short form, something like "en_GB" for British or "nl_NL" for Dutch. If all of these are present and correctly filled out it is looking positive for your site so far.
Next we are going to get a little technical. Look for the before mentioned "<body>" tag. Now in the first few lines after this tag do you see mostly "<div>" tags or mostly any of the following tags: "<table>", "<tbody>", "<tr>" or "<td>". In this case "<div>" most likely is good and the other tags are not. Using the latter tags is an outdated method of structuring a website. The main problem, in terms of SEO, is that these tags require much code to build the structure. Resulting in a bad content to code ratio. This ratio is important because the goal is to have search engines such as Google see as much user readable content as possible in the code and as little programming language as possible. The other problem with tables is that they do not always display consistently in different browsers, screen sizes and platforms. Resulting in a different user experience across systems.
The next thing we will try to look at, and this is a bit more advanced so you could skip this step, is how far the content is from the top of the page. See if you can find your page's content in the code. With content I mean the main text of this page. The goal would be to have this content as close to the <body> tag as possible in the code. Ideally it would look something like this:
<body>
<div id="content"> Welcome to our website, we would like to show you several of our products</div>
<div id="menu">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>Background</li>
</ul>
</div>
Now this is a very simplified example but it shows that the main text is very close to the body tag and that things like the menu are after the content. This is quite complicated to do properly, especially on graphically innovative websites and shows that the developer was keeping SEO in mind when programming your website
Finally as a quick check of quality you should always check to see how your website looks on as many systems as possible. Check on an Apple computer in Safari and Firefox, check in Windows on different versions of Internet Explorer if possible, mainly version 7 and 8 as these are the ones mostly in use. Also check Firefox on a Windows computer and Chrome. You could also check your site on a mobile device like a smart-phone to see how it performs on that. If the overall experience is the same on all systems it is likely that your site has been programmed to decent quality standards.
When in doubt you can always ask a professional to do a full scan of your website. Especially if your site is older than 2 years. You may be surprised at how easily some websites can be brought up to current quality and SEO standards improving your user's experience and the overall quality of your web image and brand.
Comments