RankWatch Community Forum

There are number of checklists to perform seo analysis of a website-

1) Accessibility- Make sure your site is accessible to the search engines. If search engine is not able to crawl your site that means you are doing something wrong with your site and will never get any rankings on search engines.

a) Robots.txt- Check your robots.txt file manually and see which content of your website search engines are allowed to crawl and which not. And, make sure if any important section of your site is resctricted, remove that one from robots.txt.

b) Canonicalization- Make sure your website’s does not have www and non www issue.

c) HTTP Status Codes- If your site returns 4xx and 5xx status code, Search engines and users can not access your website. Check your website status into Google Webmasters Tool.

d) XML Sitemap- Check the format of your sitemap and submit it into webmaster tools account.

e) Site Architecture- Analyse the structure of your website according to SEO guidelines.

f) Site Performance- Evaluate the performace of your website with Google Page Speed or Pingdom tool. 

2) Indexing- Type site:sitename.com on Google and check your site is indexed or not. If google does not show your site result that means your site is not indexed on search engines. If your website is new then it will take some time to crawl and index but if you have an old site and not showing on SE that means you are suffering from any issue or penalty.

3) On-page SEO Checklist- There are following factors in on-page SEO-

a) URLs- Your website urls should be short and user-friendly. It should include your keywords that relate to that specific page only. Each word should be seperated by hyphens and should avoid using excessive parameters.

b) Title Tag- It should be 70 characters or less and all pages should have an uniques title tahs. Include your business or brand name and related keywords into your title tag.

c) Meta Description- It should be unique for each page and less than 155 characters.

d) Text Formatting- You should make sure text formatting tags( Heading tag, bold and italics etc) are not missing and are used correctly on each page.

e) Content Analysis- Use Copyscape.com to check duplicacy of each content. After Panda update, each webpage has unique, high quality and lengthy content.

f) Image and Alt tag- Make sure all images have alt tag in it .

g) Interlinking- Make sure add relevant link to the page content and should not exceed than 2 – 10 internal links per page. Do not add 404 link page to the page content . Do not use only keywords optimized anchor text for the internal links but also you should use user intent and non-keyword anchor text.

h) External links- Avoid link to spammy sites and add only relevant links to the content.

i) Broken Links- Use Xenu to check all the broken links of the site and fix them.

4) Off-page SEO Factors- Off-page optimization plays an important role to get rankings on search engines. The basic goal of link building is to get other websites to link to yours. Check backlink profile of your website-

a) How many unique root domains are linking to the site?

b) Which of these domains are considered authority or trusted domains?

c) How many links are nofollow?

d) Are links coming from site that are relevant?

e) What is the percentage of anchor text distribution?

5) Competitive Analysis- Analyzing your competitors will help you get better idea to achieve higher position on Search engines. Use SEMRush tool for competitive analysis.

6) Social Media Optimization- One of the best way to engage with your customers. Optimize all the social profile you have.