How To Conduct A Basic SEO
Website Analysis In 5 Minutes

2/18/10 - Written by: Nick LeRoy

Before any search engine optimization campaign can start an SEO analysis needs to be conducted. It's very important to do an in depth examination of the entire site including their competitors, targeted keywords and a full link analysis. However, before you spend hours dissecting a website a general SEO analysis should be completed.
Why a general analysis you ask? As someone who practices SEO
you need to know what you're working with and to get a general idea
of what you can utilize to achieve top search rankings. Anyone who practices SEO should find this info useful and eventually it will become
a habit that doesn't take much effort to complete. You will find yourself using these techniques when looking at any website. This article will show you how to complete a basic website SEO analysis in five minutes or less... Ready? Set? Analyze!

Domain Name

First things first, I like to analyze the domain name before I even look at the site itself. Does the domain include any potential keywords? Having keywords within your domain can at times give you a benefit in ranking for that term. In most instances you will find that the URL is the company's name. A keyword in your domain does offer additional search value however achieving rankings without it is absolutely possible.

Title Tags

Right after the title tags I like to scan over the menus and content. Is most of the site programmed in flash or JavaScript? As of right now the search engines have difficulties reading both flash and JavaScript so it's best to use it sparingly. For the purpose of this quick analysis you want to mentally note how much of the website is search engine friendly. If you have any question about what search engines can see make sure you look at the cached version of the page. (Check out the "text-only" option too!)

URL Structure & Duplicate Content

URL structure and duplicate content is another aspect that is important to pay attention to. Static URL's that include keywords are most beneficial to your SEO. However, it is still very possible to get dynamic URL's indexed in the search engines. One draw back of dynamic URL's are that you miss out on the opportunity to add keywords to your URL. When you are checking out the URL structure keep in consideration any duplicate content issues that may occur. Is any of the content showing up on two different URL's? This will be an issue that will have to be fixed.

Sitemaps & Robots.txt Files

Typing into the end of the URL "/sitemap.xml" or "/robots.txt" and you will see whether or not they have configured an XML sitemap and or a robots.txt file. Make a mental note of this as you will want to update or create these files if you choose to implement an SEO campaign.

Frequently Updated Content

Does this website offer any blogs, newsletters, articles or any other content that is frequently updated? Search engines like to see frequent updates content so it's important to note in your analysis if the existing site includes any frequently updated content.

You're Finished! A Website SEO Analysis In Less Than 5 Minutes!

When you get in the habit of knowing what to look for this website analysis shouldn't take much longer than 5 minutes. It really gives you a better idea of what will be needed in order to make a site SEO friendly. I will note that this five minute analysis should not replace a full fledge SEO dissection. This "how to" is only meant to instruct you on determining if a website is search engine friendly or not. Going to the next level would include website code evaluation, internal link/external link analysis, full keyword research and much more. This unfortunately will take you longer than five minutes.