I recently did my first webinar to the in-house marketing folk showing them the 7 quick things they can check on their own, and their competitors, websites to see if it contains the basics of SEO.
Over the past few months I have noticed a few websites launched and were promoted on Twitter so I always pretty much go check them out.
The 7 checks I do are:
- Check if page titles and descriptions are descriptive and don’t contain the brand or page name
- Check the to see if the www. and non-www. sites redirect to one preferrred version
- Check for clean URL’s – I usually also take a letter out the URL to see what the 404 or page not found page looks like
- Check to see if an XML sitemap has been set up by typing in /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml (wordpress) after the domain
- Check to see if the site has a robots.txt file by typing in /robots.txt after the domain
- Check to see if there are any visible links on key product pages and if they still work – unbelievable how many broken links there are on older sites
- Check to see if there are any ‘alt tags’ on the images by either viewing the source code or hovering over an image on the page and waiting for a pop up box with the image title