Title:
Ideally, your title should contain between 10 and 70 characters (spaces included).
Make sure your title is explicit and contains your most important keywords.
Be sure that each page has a unique title.
Description:
Your meta description should contain between 70 and 160 characters (spaces included).
Meta descriptions allow you to influence how your web pages are described and displayed in search results.
Ensure that your meta description is explicit and contains your most important keywords.
Check your Google™ Webmaster Tools for any warning messages on duplicate meta descriptions.
Google Preview
This is an example of what your title and description will look like in Google™ search results.
Headings:
Use your keywords in the headings and make sure the first level <H1> includes your most important keywords. Never duplicate your title tag content in your header tag. For more effective SEO, use only one <H1> tag per page.
Keywords Cloud:
This Keyword Cloud provides an idea of your most frequently recurring keywords. They are likely to be the keywords with the greatest probability of ranking high in the search engines.
Keywords Consistency:
This table highlights the importance of being consistent with your use of keywords. To improve the chance of ranking high in search results with a specific keyword, you should use the most important keywords consistently in your content, title, description, H titles, internal links anchor text and backlinks anchor text.
Keywords Traffic
Alt Attribute:
Remember that search engine crawlers cannot actually “see” images, so the alternative text attribute allows you to assign a specific description to each image.
Alternative text describes your images so they can appear in Google™ Images search results.
Check the images on your website and make sure effective alternative text is specified for each image.
Restrict the number of characters in alt text to 150, including spaces, and minimize the size of images to optimize your website’s page load times.
Text/HTML Ratio:
A page’s ratio of text to HTML code is below 25 percent means that your website probably needs more text content. A ratio between 25 and 70 percent is ideal. When it goes beyond that, the page might run the risk of being considered spam. As long as the content is relevant and gives essential information, it is a plus to have more of it.
Indexed Pages:
This is the number of pages on your website that are indexed by search engines. The more pages that are indexed, the better, as this offers more opportunity for your website to be found. A low number (relative to the total number of pages/URLs on your website) probably indicates that your internal link architecture needs improvement and is preventing search engines from crawling all of the pages on your website. You might want to create/check your site’s XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines. You must also build backlinks to your site’s internal pages to help search bots crawl and index your web pages. Check Google™ Webmaster Tools under Health and Index Status, to keep track of the status of your site’s indexed pages.
Internal Pages Analysis
Google+ Publisher
Your website should have a rel=”Publisher” link to your Google+ Page. This type of authorship markup is great for your brand. It ensures that your company is featured in SERPs, as opposed to only individual authors as is common with rel=”Author”.
Google Ranking
In-Page Links
Limit the number of links to 200 per page. Use Nofollow to tell search engines “Don’t follow or crawl links on this page”.
Backlinks Counter
A Backlink is an incoming hyperlink from an external webpage to yours. The more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be. Google also places value on the backlink source.
Broken Links
Broken links send users to non-existing web pages. They are bad for your site’s usability, reputation and SEO. Broken links need to replaced or removed.
WWW Resolve
Be sure that www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com are not running in parallel. Redirecting requests from a non-preferred hostname is important because search engines consider URLs with and without “www” as two different websites. Once your preferred domain is set, use a 301 redirect for all traffic to your non-preferred domain.
IP Canonicalization
To check this for your website, enter your IP address in the browser and see if your site loads with the IP address.
Ideally, the IP should redirect to your website’s URL or to a page from your website hosting provider. If it does not redirect, you should create a 301 redirect to make sure the IP does not get indexed.
Robots.txt
A robots.txt file allows you to restrict the access of search engine robots that crawl the web and it can prevent these robots from accessing specific directories and pages. It also specifies where the XML sitemap file is located. Check your robots.txt file for syntax errors.
XML Sitemap
A sitemap lists URLs that are available for crawling and can include additional information like your site’s latest updates, frequency of changes and importance of the URLs. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. We recommend that you generate an XML sitemap for your website and submit it to both Google™ Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. It is also good practice to specify your sitemap’s location in your robots.txt file.
URL Rewrite
User-friendly URLs do not contain query strings. Clean URLs are not only SEO-friendly but are also important for usability.
Underscores in the URLs
You should rather use hyphens ( – ) to optimize your SEO. While Google™ treats hyphens as word separators, it does not treat underscores as word separators.
Blocking Factors
Flash should only be used for specific enhancements. Although Flash content often looks nicer, it cannot be properly indexed by search engines. Avoid full Flash websites to maximize SEO. This advice also applies to AJAX.
Frames can cause problems on your web page because search engines will not crawl or index the content within them. Avoid frames whenever possible and use a NoFrames tag if you must use them.
Domain Registration
Domain age matters to a certain extent and newer domains generally struggle to get indexed and rank high in search results for their first few months (depending on other associated ranking factors).
Blog
In this tough and competitive internet marketing world content marketing rules. While publishing your content on other sites might be a good strategy, publishing it on your own site garners more benefits. Starting a blog is a great way to boost your SEO and attract qualified visitors.
Mobile Rendering
The number of people using the Mobile Web is huge; over 75 percent of consumers have access to smartphones. Your website should look nice on the most popular mobile devices.
Tip: Use an analytics tool to track mobile usage of your website.
Related Websites
This lists the websites related to your domain. Some may be competitors while others may be websites with related content.
Mobile Visits
“Mobile Visits” is the number of monthly visits accessed through a mobile device.
Mobile Rendering
The number of people using the Mobile Web is huge; over 75 percent of consumers have access to smartphones. Your website should look nice on the most popular mobile devices.
Mobile Load Time
If your website takes more than five seconds to download on a mobile device, you will lose 74 percent of your audience!
Mobile usage is growing fast, especially in North America, where it will soon outpace desktop browsing usage. Make sure your site loads fast and that it looks nice on all types of mobile devices. Be sure to not use Flash, and keep photos and videos to a minimum.
Mobile Optimization
Your website should be optimized for Mobile Visitors. This means setting up a separate mobile CSS (responsive website) or building a mobile redirection to a secondary mobile site. Additional mobile optimization techniques include creating a mobile viewport tag, having a designated Apple Icon and removing Flash content.
URL
Keep your URLs short and avoid long domain names when possible. A descriptive URL is better recognized by search engines. A user should be able to look at the address bar and make an accurate guess about the content of the page before reaching it (e.g., http://www.mysite.com/en/products).
Keep in mind that URLs are also an important part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. Use clean URLs to make your site more “crawlable” by Google™. Resource: Search for a good domain name. If no good names are available, consider a second hand domain. To prevent brand theft, you might consider trademarking your domain name.
Favicon
Add a favicon to improve your brand’s visibility. As a favicon is especially important for users bookmarking your website, make sure it is consistent with your brand.
Custom 404 Page
Take the opportunity to provide visitors with a beautiful and helpful 404 Error Page to increase user retention.
Conversion Forms
Add a conversion form for repeat visitors. It could be used to sign up for a subscription, get an email address of a visitor or close an online sale. Converting visitors into prospects/clients is probably the most important goal for your website. After adding a conversion form to your site, it is important that you optimize your website to boost conversions.
Above the Fold Content
When designing your homepage, make sure that the most important content is placed above the fold (the top section, which is visible without scrolling). Screen resolutions can also vary depending on your target audience.
Page Size
Two of the main reasons for an increase in page size are images and JavaScript files. Page size affects the speed of your website; try to keep your page size below 300 Kb.
Tip: Use images with a small size and optimize their download time. Images can be compressed in Photoshop or by using other image editing software.
Load Time
Slow page load time is one of the biggest complaints of web users.
If the load time/Kb is short, it means your homepage is too big. If the load time/Kb is long, this could be due to a server problem, a network problem, poor code optimization (cache, Mysql queries, etc.), or a third-party issue (advertising codes, analytics codes, etc.). Site speed is becoming an important factor for ranking high in Google™ search results.
Language
Use the META Language Attribute to declare the intended language of your website.
For multilingual websites, define the language of the content in each page’s HTML code or specify the language code in the URL as well (e.g., “mywebsite.com/fr/mycontent.html”).
Printability
A Print-Friendly CSS is a special CSS style sheet which ensures that unnecessary interface designs and images are left out when printing pages from your site, saving the user a lot of ink.
It is just another way to provide a rich user-experience.
Metadata
Metadata is used to generate Rich Snippets in search engine results. It is a way for website owners to send structured data to search engine robots; helping them to understand your content and create well-presented search results. Google™ supports rich snippets for the following content types: Reviews, People, Products, Businesses and Organizations, Recipes, Events and Music.
Domain Availability
Register the various extensions of your domain to protect your brand from cybersquatters. This also gives the user another way to find your website and helps avoid confusion.
Typo Availability
Register the various typos of your domain to protect your brand from cybersquatters and help avoid confusion with the user.
Email Privacy
Malicious bots scrape the web in search of email addresses and plain text email addresses are more likely to be spammed.
Spam Block
It is important that your SEO efforts are not tarnished by spammy activities. Take care to avoid forum and blog spam and use best practices when sharing your content.
In addition, if you send email campaigns or transactional emails, use professional email software to keep your IP clean and improve the deliverability of your emails.
Trust Indicators
Safe Browsing
Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.
Malware, short for malicious software, is any software used to disrupt computer operation, gather sensitive information, or gain access to private computer systems.
Server IP
Your server’s IP address has little impact on your SEO. Nevertheless, try to host your website on a server which is geographically close to your visitors. Search engines take the geolocation of a server into account as well as the server speed. Use DNSstuff for comprehensive reports on your server.
Technologies
Some codes or technologies might slow down your website.
Speed Tips
Website speed has a huge effect on SEO. Speed-up your website so search engines will reward you by sending more visitors. Also, conversion rates are far higher for websites that load faster than their slower competitors.
Analytics
Web analytics let you measure visitor activity on your website. You should have at least one analytics tool installed. It is also good to install one extra tool to have a confirmation of the results.
Analytics Tools: Google™ Analytics, Quantcast™, SiteCatalyst™, Piwik™, chartbeat™, Clicky™, ClickTale™, etc.
W3C Validity
Use valid markup that contains no errors. Syntax errors can make your page difficult for search engines to index. To find the detected errors, run the W3C validation service, or check Validator.nu to make sure you don’t miss an error. W3C is a consortium that sets web standards.
Doctype
Encoding
Language/character encoding is not specified, this may cause problems with the rendering of special characters.
Deprecated HTML
Deprecated HTML tags are HTML tags that are no longer used. Deprecated HTML tags should be remove or replace because these HTML tags are now obsolete.
Directory Browsing
Turning off Directory Browsing for your server prevents visitors from browsing your directory by accessing it directly, this is excellent from a security standpoint.
Server Signature
Turning your server’s signature off is excellent from a security standpoint.
Backlinks Counter
Backlinks are links that point to your website from other websites. They are like letters of recommendation for your site.
Since this factor is crucial to SEO, you should have a strategy to improve the quantity and quality of backlinks.
Traffic from Backlinks
This section shows the backlinks which sent the most traffic to your site during the previous week.
Backlinks with Juice
This is a ranking of the most authoritative websites which are linking back to your website.
Social Shareability
The impact of social media is huge for certain industries.
Make sure you have opened social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other sites that are of interest to your customers.
Engage your social media audiences and create a consistent fan base. You can also use your website to increase your popularity on social platforms.
Note: This data represents social media influences from your website’s URL; it does not represent data from specific brand pages.
Facebook stats
These data regarding the Facebook Page are publicly available.
“Likes”: is the number of unique people who like your Page.
“Checkins”: is the total number of users who have checked in to the Page.
“Talking About”: is the number of people that are talking about this Page.
Facebook Page
The data regarding the Facebook Page is publicly available.
Twitter™ Account
Enhance your Twitter statistics by building connections with industry experts and exchanging expertise or content.
Google+ Page
This page is your business listing in Google+. Being active in this social network is important for claiming your brand, influencing your search engine rankings and interacting with your network. You might also consider managing your profile with Google My Business (formerly Google Places).
Google™ Ranking
These are Google™’s rankings of your website based on a keyword search.
Traffic Estimations
We use multiple tools to estimate web traffic, including Google™ Trends and Alexa™. Nevertheless, your analytics will provide the most accurate traffic data.
Visitors
Sessions is the number of monthly visits to your site.
New Sessions include every visitor that has been inactive for 30 minutes.
Behaviors
Average Time is the average duration – in seconds – of a visit to your site.
Pageviews
Pageviews per Visit (Average Page Depth) is the average number of pages viewed during a visit to your site. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Source
Referral Traffic is the number of monthly visits from domains (and pages in those domains) which are referring traffic to your site.
Direct Traffic is the number of monthly visits from URLs which are the most popular destinations to directly access your website.
Organic Traffic is the number of monthly visits naturally driven by search engines.
Source Domains
Source Domains provides a list of the top domains from which traffic is originated in the past month.
Traffic Rank
A low rank means that your website gets a lot of visitors.
Your Alexa Rank is a good estimate of the worldwide traffic to your website, although it is not 100 percent accurate.
Reviewing the most visited websites by country can give you valuable insights. Quantcast provides similar services.
Adwords Traffic
This is an estimation of the traffic that is being bought through AdWords™ vs. unpaid Organic Traffic.
This data is provided by SEMRush™.
Countries
Countries shows the list of the top countries from which your website has been accessed.
We recommend that you book the domain names for the countries where your website is popular. This will prevent potential competitors from registering these domains and taking advantage of your reputation in such countries.
