Do you need a website health check?

If you are in the process of putting together a search engine marketing campaign, you do. The data that you can receive from them will help you fix your website’s errors as well as make sure that they are indexed properly. They can also help you fix errors embedded deep within your website’s codes and contents, thus proactively stopping them before they become a serious problem.

Website health checks essentially focus around the testing and analysis of a website. The process involves a quick look into the codes and archives of your web pages then determine which of them are giving the search engines trouble.

The results of the analysis will then be given to you in the form of a report. Based upon the options that you have chosen, your report will show you the status of the different parts of your website and how you can solve the ones that have problems. More importantly however, it will also show you what search engine spiders are looking for whenever they enter your website’s contents.

So what do these reports tell us?

Well first, we need to divide them into two. These are:

1. Site Analysis
2. Performance Analysis

Let’s examine each one in more detail.

Site Analysis – This type of report focuses on identifying broken, unavailable, duplicate and corrupted pages. Throughout the entire process, each of your site’s pages is scrutinised to make sure that it has no problems at all. After the report is finished, the site analysis report will show you which pages you’ll need to repair.

Among the information that you can expect to receive, include:

1. Missing or Broken Title Tags
2. Missing Description Tags
3. Duplicate Title Tags
4. Duplicate Description Tags
5. Unique Link Sitemap

One of the greatest benefits of site analysis is that it allows you to see your web pages from the perspective of the search engines. If you have this unique insight, you can create more SEO friendly title and description tags that can meet the criteria of the search engine spiders.

Performance Analysis – This type of report focuses on your web pages’ speed and loading performance. If the report says that the loading speed is more than 7 seconds, it means that you will need some repair.

Most performance analysis creates test scripts which begin at your base URL and then navigate through that page at an average of 6 to 8 times. The timing analysis is usually performed with the help of an empty cache in order to determine the relative download time of every page component.

Other Features – Other than making sure that your web pages are truly working in top condition, website health checks will also analyse websites to make sure that they are meeting the expectations and requirements of the major search engines.

By making sure that your website is compliant with the requirements of Google, Yahoo and MSN, your site will receive better results in the search index. Here are other report features that you can expect:

1. Navigation statistics of your site
2. Link analysis
3. Report on your search engine ranking
4. SEO reports and recommendations

So to sum up what a website health check is all about, it is a tracking and analytics tool that allows website owners to optimise their web pages towards SEO friendly goals. It’s also important in determining the speed and performance of your web pages as well as its various tags and links. So if your web pages haven’t yet had a website health check, you should seriously consider getting one now.