What SEO strategies have you missed? What mistakes have you made?

How could you know? After all, you missed them. How can you possibly know what tactics you forgot about? The good news is there are plenty of diagnostic tools on the internet that can help you identify problems or missed opportunities on your website.

This chapter introduces three of my personal favorites. None of them cost any money and they each offer tremendous insights to evaluate and improve your website.

Google Webmaster Tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Like so many other services, Google offers the webmaster tools platform free of charge. The platform has an impressive series of tools you can use to diagnose and fine-tune your website.

But before you can do anything, you need to verify that it is, in fact, your website. Don’t worry. The verification is easy to do. Full instructions are provided.

Once verified, you can see any errors the Google spiders experienced when crawling your website. You can also see when Google visited your site last and how many pages they crawled and/or indexed.

One important setting you can specify on the webmaster tools platform is your preferred domain format. In case you didn’t know, the “www” at the beginning of most domain names is actually optional. You don’t need to include it. But there’s a problem.

Let’s assume your website has the “www” in the complete URL. People who link to your website without the “www” experience an automatic redirect. In other words, they will get to your website but only because the computer knows to redirect them.

Those redirected links work but they’re not precise. Because they’re not direct, they don’t count as an inbound link from a search engine perspective. Unless …

Google Webmaster Tools allows you to specify your preferred domain format, either with or without the “www.” It’s under the Settings tab and I recommend you do that immediately. It ensures that links using either format count as legitimate inbound links.

The platform also allows you to view a series of diagnostic summaries, index statistics, internal/external links and your sitemap. If you enjoy the techie stuff, you can even analyze and generate a robot.txt file to help Google navigate your website.

Google Webmaster Tools is a powerful platform. Take advantage of it.

The SEO-Browser
http://www.seo-browser.com/

SEO Browser is a brilliant tool that shows you what your website looks like to a search engine. If you visit the site, I recommend you click on the “Advanced” tab in the top right-hand corner and then enter your domain name in the search field.

The tool shows you exactly what a search engine sees … and what it does not see. In other words, it shows you the opportunities you’re missing. It shows you places where you can enter more descriptive keywords and headings.

The nice thing about the SEO Browser is that you can navigate around your site by clicking on the various links and it stays inside the tool and shows you the search engine perspective throughout. Try it. Browse your site.

SEO Browser also tells you how many internal and external links are on each page. The Google webmaster guidelines recommend you limit the outbound links on any particular page to 100. The SEO Browser tells you immediately if you have exceeded that number.

Chapter 29 discussed Google’s preference for sentences and paragraphs. Bottom line; Google loves lots of content. The SEO Browser calculates the “text to page weight ratio,” offering valuable insight to how search engines evaluate the density of written content on your website.

Another important insight is the size of the page in terms of memory and how quickly it loads. You want your webpages to require as little memory as possible, allowing for quicker load times.

Unnecessarily large image files are the most common culprit for slow-loading pages. Before you upload images to your website, make sure they’re no more than 72 dots per inch (DPI) and optimized for the web.

The SEO Browser provides dozens of valuable insights. Check it out.

Website Grader
http://website.grader.com/

Website Grader takes a much broader view of your website and attempts to assess its marketing effectiveness compared with other websites on the internet. It looks at things like page optimization, load times, syndication options, domain registration and social media presence.

The tool isn’t that great from a strictly SEO perspective but it does a fantastic job of reminding you about all the different angles of an effective website. Run the tool on your website and see what it suggests. I guarantee it will put a few items on your to-do list.

By the way, the Website Grader gives you a score out of 100, telling you how your site ranked compared with all the other sites it looks at. I recommend you ignore it. Most websites are a complete disaster so a good score from this tool does not mean you have a great website. It just means you did better than some others.

Keep in mind that the top 1% of websites accounts for the vast majority of all online transactions. That means you should be shooting for a score of 99 or higher. Don’t get too excited about a 70 or 80. We still have work to do!

Author Bio: Patrick is the author of \”Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed\” (2011, Wiley) and a regular speaker for Bloomberg TV. Watch his video about SEO diagnostic tools on YouTube.

Category: Business
Keywords: patrick,schwerdtfeger,seo,diagnostic,tools