Website Evaluation Services

What is Website Evaluation?

As a first step of our Search Engine Optimization services process, evaluating a website helps us get an idea of the "as is" status of the website.

The process of evaluating a website is more of a "due diligence" on your site, examining it for various obvious deficiencies from the Search Engine Optimization perspective. This process covers identification of various issues like page size, browser compatibility, spider friendly-ness etc.

Here are some of the points to look at during the evaluation process:

• Robots.txt file

  While evaluating a website, one of the first things you should look at is the robots.txt file. The Robots.txt file consists of set of instructions for search engine robots. It includes terms like "User-agent", "Disallow" among others. "User-agent" indicates the name of the spider. For example, "Googlebot" is the spider name used by Google; the "Disallow" directive give instructions what to index and what needs to be skipped by spiders. The "Disallow" directive can include a filename, a directory or even an html page name. You may even use of wildcards like '*' as explained below. Always check if the site has a valid Robots.txt file. Always ensure that the Robots.txt file is kept in the root folder of the website.

• Navigation Structure, Directory Structure

  Good navigation on your website helps the user and the search engines understand the structure of your site. It is very practical to have two sets of navigation: one for the users of the site and the other for the search engine spiders. If you use image maps for your main site navigation you should consider switching to standard HTML hyperlinks or your site would most likely not get spidered. If you want to keep the image maps you can, but you should add another navigation scheme to your site that uses only standard HTML hyperlinks.

• Number of pages website should contain

  "How many pages should be my website have?" is one of the most common questions asked. There is no magic number, really! The more the merrier, but the quality of a page is of utmost importance. Your pages must be very informative and content rich. You must make these pages with the "reader" in mind, and provide crisp and relevant information on the page.

• Search Engine incompatibility features

  This is an important step during the website evaluation process-- it tells you what to avoid! Are you using a lot of JavaScript or any other scripts in the pages? If you have links within the JavaScript's, SE's will not be able to spider them and hence it's a good idea to have all your pages in a sitemap and have all your pages link to this sitemap.
  
  Avoid using heavy images; it takes a lot of time to load and may not go well with the spider. Also, spiders can't read the images or objects like Java Applets. Even though Google has recently started to recognizing and indexing the Flash files, it is still safer to replicate to reflect the information otherwise, so that other spiders do not miss out on that. In short, avoid Java Applets, Flash and heavy Images.

• Website Content

  Building your website content is a key function in the SEO process. The quality of your website content is paramount importance to not only the user of your site but also to the search engines. About 200-500 words of unique, great quality and keyword-rich content can give a big boost your search engine rankings. Always try to write content for both search engine spider as well as the user. There is a very delicate balance between not going overboard with using keywords and writing content that would make great reading for the casual browser. Write content in such way so it will cover all your keyword phrases as well as marketing copy to create the right impact on the users mind to purchase your product or services.

• Dynamic Website

  Dynamic websites are those that generate web pages on the fly (from the database or elsewhere). Typically, these online retail stores have dynamic pages, which pick up product information and pricing from a database. You can see dynamic pages from the URLS - pages that have symbols like '?', '&' in their URL's are dynamic URL's. Search engines do not index dynamic and some other characters in the URL link. What this means is all the pages that have this URL and the pages that follow will most probably not be indexed and your potential customers may never find them.

• Frameset

  Search engines do not index framed sites very well. In fact, search engines do such a poor job of indexing frames that we recommend redesigning your site without them if you want to get good listings in the search engines. As we know, Frames are among main search engine incompatibility features in a website. If you must use frames, there is one way you might index your website and that is by making use of the <noframes> </noframes> TAGS inside the body.

• Broken Links and Redirect

  Are there any broken links or Redirects? Pages with 404 errors are considered as a broken links. If a spider finds broken/dead links on your website it might not return back again. We recommend removing such broken/dead links as soon as possible.

• Sitemap

  It is highly recommended to have a sitemap containing links pointing to all the pages on the website. The sitemap should be linked from home page as well as from every page of website. Sitemaps also act as an access point for the spider to crawl all the pages on the website.