18. Checking your web page

Of course you must check your website for spelling and grammar and so on.

However I am here talking of the checking that has to be done to make sure your website and each web page is ready for publishing to the www ready for the world and the search engines to see.

Chris Ridings who first published information on PageRank and made it available to the SEO community has also compiled a list with the help of his forum members that identifies some 80 different items to be checked for to ensure maximum on-page ranking factors.

We also know from Chriss interview with a Google spokesman that the Google algorithm includes 100 other parameters in addition to PageRank.

To do this checking manually takes up a massive amount of time and if you have many pages becomes a chore and any chore is boring and repetitive and leads to mistakes being made very often. If only there was a way of doing this automatically and not just for Google but all other important search engines too. Of course there is

The best known is SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISER, which is discussed below.

18.1 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISER

Imagine counting every word in every text link, every word in each section of a page and then counting the number of times the keyword appeared and so on and so on. Here is a screen shot showing the result of a request for a complete check against all SEARCH ENGINE Optimizers known ranking factors for Inktomi search. Notice how the output information is arranged into:

Warnings

Suggestions and

Tips

You can use this program to analyze competitor pages for selected keywords and it can do this for all important search engines including Google.

This program saves a lot of work if you have more than a few web pages. Highly recommended.

18.2 GRKDA

From the same stable as SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISER.

One of the ongoing needs in assessing opportunities to get higher rankings on the SERPs is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of competing web pages.

A good tool to do this is called GRKDA and is essentially a piece of Internet software that will compare very important keywords properties for as many web pages as you choose. The software allows export to a spreadsheet for further analysis and ease of handling. This screenshot the parameters about which it can easily and quickly collect statistics. This also shows you can be highly selective.

18.3 BROKEN LINKS

You appreciate no doubt at this stage that links are vital to the success of your optimization work and getting high rankings in the SERPs.

It is vital therefore that each link on every page works i.e. the links are not broken to use Internet jargon.

If a search engine comes across a web page using a link from another page and that link is broken the visitor will see the well known 404 error message.

Even worse can happen. If the search engine is spidering your site and comes across the broken link then your web page does not get indexed end of story. All that work was wasted until one day you realize that something is wrong.

You have to check link validity for every page. Despite taking great care there was a badly broken link on my initial web pages which took me about 4 weeks to discover.

Fortunately there is good easy-to-use software that does this monotonous job for you and it is also free. It is of course also a very good idea to actually surf your own web pages to do this check.

Shown below is a small section of the main screen during the link checking note that Xenu identified bad/broken links .

Xenu is an easy to use FREE software that provides you with a detailed report on your website in terms of link validity. Here is a screen shot of a finished report.

A nice spin-off from using XENU is that it also produces a complete list of all the URLs on your website which can save a lot of typing when this information is needed for other control and information purposes.