When working on public facing websites for clients, they often ask me to optimize their site for search engines. Most developers I’ve worked with will just hold up their hands at this point and do one of the following:
- Get a dedicated SEO consultant in.
- Start expressing the virtue of meta keywords and description tags.
- Submit the website to lots of online directories using automated tools.
Whilst the only sure-fire way of getting a complete SEO strategy is to hire an SEO professional, there are a few simple rules that you can apply to your site in order to avoid some common pitfalls.
I listed these metrics for on-site SEO and automated the process that I would perform manually through a free online service, SEO grep.
The site analyses your website using a web-crawler and calculates a score out of 100 for each page. The name comes from the Unix command to search, grep. More truthfully, this is also a reflection on the sparsity of good, short and meaningful .com domain names!
The report produced by SEO grep includes metrics from on-page SEO (HTML structure), site structure (folder layout, page parameters) and site-wide metrics on your domain (domain age, server location).
SEO grep is currently limited to analysing the first 25 pages on your site – this is due to bandwidth and server restrictions I currently have. I’m working to increase this cap, and adding 20+ more metrics to the results.
You can try SEO grep here and leave feedback on the UserVoice account.