Obviously the first and foremost chore is checking the sites visibility on Google, the number of the sites pages indexed on Google. There is a very easy command for this and itssite:example.com.Note down the number of pages the site has in total and compare it with all the pages indexed on Google. Also check the sites ranking for the related keywords on Google.

A websites URL must contain a small description about the web page in four to five words. If the URL is not optimized, the search engine bots can have a hard time figuring out what your site is about and which category/area your site belongs to.

Analyze the meta description tag for each page on the website. A meta description is shown as the rich snippet on Google upon the lists returned to a related search query done by the user. You need to check whether the meta description includes the right keywords as well as entices the visitors to click on to the site.

Is the webpage title and headings containing all themarketable keywords? I say, marketable keywords, because there is no use targeting keywords that have a high search volume or a click through rate. They wont or will generate very less enquiries. The use of marketable keywords is necessary considering that the ultimate goal of formulating an SEO campaign is to generate more business and expand ones market. Record whether the H1, H2, H3 and H4 tags are optimized for the best marketable keywords

Alexa.comgives you the global ranking of your website in terms of users visiting your website. Though its not an accurate way of measuring traffic, it gives you an insight into the position of the website among all the other websites in the world. It also displays the country wise rankings for your website. It is a simple tool to know the bounce rate of your site and the average time visitor spends on your site.

The best feature is that theAlexa Site Overviewshows the top 5 search keywords which are sending traffic to your site. This can be really useful to optimize your sites content incorporating these keywords.

 

This is important to find out the trust value of the website as far as Google is concerned. Page Authority is an indicator of how a webpage ranks in Google while Domain authority points out how your site domain ranks in Google.

Many websites have gotten links from low authority or spammy directories, contributing to bringing down their Page Authority, or increasing their spam score. Finding out spam score is necessary to eliminate all the bad links pointing at the website. TheMoz Open Site Explorer toolworks best to show these. You can also attach a screenshot like the one below supporting your stats.

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors clicking on the close or back button of their browser when they come across a website. The bounce rate is to be reported while doing a website analysis. It can be found out viaAlexa.comor through the sites Google Analytics profile, if you are granted the access. While reporting the bounce rate, you should also analyze and state what can be done to decrease- maybe increasing the page loading speed might help or maybe a rearrangement of content is required.

Analyzing the number of links coming to your website as well as the competitors websites is necessary to know the amount of work thats to be done as part of the SEO campaign for the site.

• Using Link checkers/tools online:There are lots of backlink checker tools like Ahrefs tool, the Moz Open Site Explorer which shows the links pointing to your site
• Using SEO commands:Alternately if you use thelink:command example.comon Google, you will get a list of sites having links to the webpage concerned. But Google just shows a few links. So its really good to use Yahoo for this purpose as it lists out all possible links. The command has a minor difference and it goes like thislinkdomain:example.com
• How to know if a website has got bad links?The spam score in Moz Open Site explorer can indirectly state the number of spam links you have got. For example, if it is getting displayed in orange, you have 3 bad links. If youve got a red spam score, then it means you have got more than 6 bad links. In this case, the only option is to manually analyze each and every linking site, find all the sites with a bad spam score and use the Disavow tool to remove them.

So you have got a certain number of links from different domains to your site. But what is the anchor text thats having the hyperlink in them? In SEO, its very important you get links with the relevant anchor text and with this, the surrounding content quality also matters.

How to find these anchor texts?To find out the anchor text of every link coming to your site, you can use theSEMRushBacklink Analysis tool. If you are signed in, you can see all the backlinks to your site, classified as links coming from domain and root domain and most significantly the anchor text which gave the link.

A website is built up of a number of files. More the number of files, higher will be the number of requests made to the server by the browser program. When there are a large number of requests to be made, it affects the page loading speed and this can be a big turn off to the visitor trying to access your website. Note the number of requests to be made to the websites server and make recommendations on how you can combine similar files and java scripts.

The Waterfall:You can view the waterfall diagram of your site on clicking the waterfall tab on the menu below the scores. This can also be viewed on another website analysis website which is thePingdomWebsite Speed Test tool. The waterfall shows the number of requests made by a browser to the server and the time taken for each request in a cascading form. The length/height of the waterfall indicates the number of requests and the width denotes the time taken for the request to receive a response thats to be downloaded on the browser.

GTMetrixgives a clean summary of your websites loading speed in Google and Yahoo browsers in the form ofPageSpeedandYSlowscores respectively. Below you can see all the reasons and options listed below neatly. You can click on each of the options and work on the suggestions given.

To leverage your browsers caching means that you can control and specify the time period in which the browsers should store and keep the images, CSS and Javascripts locally. Its done to reduce loading time in the users browsers.

Leverage Browser caching gives the user many advantages like saving data because already a certain amount of the website data is stored in the browsers cache the first time he visits the page. For the website owner, the advantage leverage browser caching gives is that it doesnt send the user away from visiting his site as the page loads with great speed and less time.

How leverage browser caching is done?
Go to Google and search for leverage browser cache htaccess code. You will find many pages which have the code. It should look like something below. Copy the code andpaste it to the file having the .htacess codeof your website. You can ask the sites developer to do the same for you.

The G Zip compression code helps you transfer files easily. Just like you compress files into a ZIP for easy transfer on your computer, websites can also use the G Zip compression code for doing the task of transferring the files from the server to the users browser easily. The advantage of this code is that compresses the many files on the server into a ZIP file and then after the ZIP file has been transferred to the users browser, the Zip file is extracted and uncondensed and displayed on the browser in the original form. All these happens at a speedy rate and the user doesnt get to know them.

How to enableG ZipCompression?Google G Zip compressionhtaccess code. Out of any of the webpages mentioning the code, copy the code and paste it to thefile having the .htacess codeof your website. You can ask the sites developer to do the same for you.

Just like the G Zip and leverage browser caching codes, the Keep Alive code, if added in the .htacess file for your website, it helps in achieving faster page loading speed. The Keep Alive code is used to allow a persistent connection between the server and web browser. Usually, every time a new request is made for each file on the server, a new TCP connection has to be established. With Keep Alive, just one TCP connection is required to send requests for all the files altogether.

How to enable Keep Alive?Google Keep Alive htaccess code. Copy the code from any of the webpages having the code andpaste it to the file containing the .htaccess codeof the website. Again, if you are not familiar doing this for your website, seek help from the developer who has developed the website. It is rather better not trying to break your website for this.

If you have a low score against this point, you need to resize all the images on the website and place them in the appropriate sections of your website.

Having a defined image size thats optimized both in terms of resolution and is very important for a website, especially when it comes to page loading speed. The Optimize Image option in GTMetrix.com not only tells you which images you need to fix on the site, but also provides you with the optimized image samples which you can download and save for use in you site.

Parsing (analyzing and breaking the code into parts and reading their applicability) of JavaScript is done when the browser loads a webpage. If your site has too many JavaScript lines, then it can impact the page loading speed by slowing it done. So the best solution is to defer parsing of JavaScript for the website by adding the defer attribute in the JavaScript code. Another option is to load all the java scripts at the bottom of the HTML page.

If your website has got a lot of images to handle, it can slow down the page loading speed. Combining all the images of the site in a CSS Sprite can reduce page loading time as well as enable data savings for the user. If you have a low score against this option, considering writing a good CSS Sprite for the website concerned. You can seek the aid of the websites developer for this.

This score indicates unnecessary characters in the JavaScript and CSS of the website, which can slow down page loading speed. If your score for this option is low, they also give recommendations on the unnecessary characters that are to be removed.

Broken links or links to a page that do not exist/ has been removed can reduce crawlability of the webpage. If your site has broken links or links to other sites having broken links, Google bots will hesitate to crawl across your webpage.

If a person comes against a404 Page Not Found errorwhen surfing your website, he usually just clicks on the close/back button of his browser. Its unsure as to whether he will come back to your site or not and chances are he will not visit your website forever! So creating a custom 404 page is mandatory if you want to keep your user on the website itself.

Certain tips to be noted while creating the custom 404 Page are:

• Maintain the same navigation and menus as the rest of the site
• Inform the visitor that the Page they are looking for is not found
• Include suggestions for browsing any other pages of the website
• A search tab can also be included

CDNs or Content Delivery Network is a worldwide distribution network of proxy servers. The way a CDN works is simple. For example, if you have a website hosted in New York, people in New York and nearby states can load the site faster than the people far away, say India.

CDNs eliminate this difference by storing the websites data files in its servers which are located in different countries and these are called POP servers (point of presence). So when a person is loading the site from US or India or the UAE, he/she can load the site in more or less the same time because they dont need to travel all the way to the websites origin server. Rather they can go back and forth from their browsers to the POP server. CDNs can store content, videos and images.

CDN benefits for your website:Besides playing a huge role in optimizing page speed, CDNs ensure safety as your site as it stores all the website files in its temporary cache which users can access, even if there is an Internet malfunction. It also prevents the site from crashing as the CDNs divide the page load time among the different geographically located servers.

Having an XML site map for the website enables better crawling by the Google bots. Check if the website has a sitemap and if it doesnt, make recommendations for the same in the report. One can generate a sitemap from many of the XML sitemap generators available online.