SEO – Test Your SEO Efforts
Test & Fine Tune Your SEO Efforts
Now I wouldn’t mind betting that a fairly high percentage of you will be muttering to yourselves ” Yeah yeah done all that everything is fine! ” Well I’ll bet you that in the majority of cases your SEO efforts are far from fine. The thing is we all start out with a very clear idea of what our blog is going to be about & we choose our description & keywords accordingly. You then settle into a few months of serious article writing & very often end up wondering why things are not progressing as you may of expected!
The Problem
The problem lies in the fact that while we may have a very clear idea in our minds, of what our blog is all about, this does not always carry through to the articles that we write! Now if you multiply this by several weeks & a dozen or so articles, it soon becomes very clear that our SEO efforts are not doing what they should be in terms of blog promotion & improved ranking.
My SEO Tool Kit
One of my favourite tools to check my blog is a website called whois.domaintools.com Unfortunately this tool is of no use to anyone that is not self hosted, for the simple reason that if you use one of the free blog hosting companies, your blog will be a sub directory and this tool will end up checking the host page and not your blog.
Anyway this site is free to use & can display how your website / blog may appear to search engines. It checks the Title Relevance, Description Relevance & Keywords Relevance, plus several other important areas that could have a detrimental effect on our ranking with search engines.
Click image to enlarge
You can see in the image, I have placed red markers to the points of interest & whilst now, this blog is showing 100% for Title, Description & Keywords, when checking it earlier it reported;
Title =75%, Description 63% & Keywords 56% and a SEO Score of 82%
Ah now the penny has dropped eh…? Now you see what I mean about we have an idea in our heads of what the blog is about, but our posts / articles don’t always tell the same story ! Ok I accept that Google no longer uses the meta_keywords tag, at least not for deciding ranking of your pages!
However there are many other search egines that can & will penalize if keywords in your meta tag are not found in the text of your articles. As for Title & description, these are the two most important factors in helping a search engine discover what your blog is all about, therefore if these two tags are not 100%, then it is quite feasable that a search engine may have a totally different idea about your blog than the one you have been working towards.
My Advice
Use this tool regularly to test your seo efforts & always try and get 100% relevancy for your Title, Description & Keywords, also clean up any other errors it may report such as missing alt tags on images, width & height measurements on all images & also ensure that your outbound links are considerably lower than your inbound links.
This last one should need no explanation really, but for those that don’t know, if you have 1,000 links coming in & 1,000 links going out, then you may as well have zero links because your outgoing links will cancel out your incoming links if they are of equal page rank. If not then they will certainly deplete the vaue of your inbound links. As a basic rule try to keep your links to 1/3rd outbound & 2/3rds inbound, this at least will allow some margin for error.
If you have any questions regarding this article or the advice given, then please either use the comment box below or you may also post questions in the Forum.
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Dec 27 2011. Filed under SEO Optimization.
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domaintools.com has a lot of useful tools for bloggers.
You can also check your website score at http://www.scoreinthebox.com.
It gives you some backlink and pr information.
Hi Kelly,
if your talking about on WhoIsDomainTools.com ?
Go to site profile obviously after searching for your domain, then scroll down the page until you find “Search Engine Preview (View details)” Click on “View Details” & a window will open, at the top left corner there is a small refresh button, click that & the SEO score at the far right will change accordingly.
When you finish making adjustments clear your browser cache by pressing the F5 key on your keyboard, this will cause the page to display the correct SEO scores.
Hope that helps
I was just wondering if you knew how long these scores take to update once you have made some changes?