The SEO Triage is a first look at your site. The goal: Find any crushing issues, or easily-fixed issues, and take care of them, right now.
It’s also a great way to jump-start your SEO campaign. A lot of folks bog down in keyword research and link strategy and never actually do anything that might improve rankings. By starting with the triage, you can have an impact, right away.
The Triage should take no more than 1-2 hours. To perform SEO Triage, you need:
- Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar. If you don’t have it, get it.
- Google Page Speed
- A link checking crawler, such as Integrity or Xenu.
A typical Triage finds 5-10 simple, easily-executed SEO tweaks. Note that these triage items are in priority order. #1 is more important than #10. Got it? Here’s how you do it:
The procedures on this page assume you have basic knowledge of HTML or of the content management system you use. If you do not, you are probably not the right person to be doing the Triage.
Step 1: Redirection
Roadblocks
- In the Web Developer Toolbar, click ‘Disable Meta Redirects’ and ‘Disable All Javascript’ under the ‘Disable’ menu:
Disabling javascript using the Web Developers Toolbar
- Then visit the site’s home page.
- Do you get a blank page?.
- If no, then move to cloaking. If you answered ‘yes’, the site has a major problem. Chances are, the redirect that’s set up is preventing search engines from entering the site. To fix the problem, do the following:
- While viewing the blank page, click view>source or the equivalent. That will show you the page source code.
- Look for something like
<meta name=”refresh” url=”some web address here”
The key is the meta refresh. Those two words together mean you’re using a meta refresh tag (clearly). Search engines don’t like meta refresh, so it could be hurting you. - If you don’t see that, look for something like
<script type=”text/javascript”>location.href=”some web address here”
If you find something like that, chances are you’re redirecting using javascript. The key is the location.href, which is a javascript command that tells a visiting browser “Go here instead.” Search engines will typically ignore javascript. That means, when they hit this page, they stop dead, and your site doesn’t get indexed. - If the site is yours, remove the refresh or javascript and make the target of the redirect the home page, instead.
Cloaking
- Keep your browser set as it was in the previous step. Go to the site’s home page at www.youraddress.com.
- Do you get stuck on some form of ‘gateway’ page that isn’t the home page?
- If no, then move on. If you answered ‘yes’, the site has a major problem. Chances are, the redirect that’s set up is putting the site at risk for penalties from the search engines. To fix the problem, do the following:
- If the site is yours, remove the cloaking/redirection. Make the home page that most visitors see the true home page, so that search engines will find the same thing if they go to www.mysite.com.
Step 2: Canonicalization
On the site, find the ‘home’ link. If you don’t find a link labeled ‘home’, check the company/organization logo and see if that links back to the home page (it often does). Does the home link point at http://www.siteaddress.com/, with no extra stuff on the end? If yes, no recommendations are necessary. If no, and you find something like www.siteaddress.com/index.cfm as the link, there’s a problem with canonicalization. Again, you can learn more about this subject in other sections of this guide. For now, though, understand that using inconsistent URLs for home page links hurts a site’s authority.
If this is your site, or you have control over the site, change all links that point at the home page to point at http://www.siteaddress.com/ with nothing else on the end.
Step 3: Title Tags
Inspect the title tags on the top 20-30 pages of the site. The easiest way to do this is to look in the title bar of your web browser (the very top of the browser window):
The title tag
You can also use a crawler like Xenu Link Sleuth to crawl the entire site and then get a list of title tags. Or, you can use the Web Developer Toolbar: Click information > View Page Information, and the title tag is up at the top of the window:
Viewing the title tag in page info
If you can answer yes to any of the following, the title tags need immediate improvement:
- Some pages have no title tag at all.
- Some or all title tags start with the company name, not keywords.
- All title tags are the same.
- Title tags are longer than 80 characters.
- Title tags are shorter than 30 characters.
Every page should have a unique title that, if you wrote it on a blank sheet of paper, clearly explains what the page is about. We can’t target keywords yet, since this is just the triage, but I guarantee that starting the title tag with the company name isn’t the best strategy.
Start revising those title tags! They’re the single most important element of on-page optimization.
Step 4: ALT attributes
On any page of the site, in the Web Developer Toolbar, click ‘Images’ then ‘Display Alt Attributes’:
Showing alt tags with the Web Developers Toolbar
ALT tags definitely help with SEO. They also help with image optimization in blended search. So you want descriptive ALT attributes for every image on a page. If any images don’t have ALT attributes, or if they have unhelpful ALT attributes like the file name, it’s time to get to work. Write some decent ALT attributes.
Step 5: Site speed
Finally, check the site for page download speed issues. The faster your site delivers content to visiting browsers and search engines, the more pages a search engine can crawl per visit (and the more customers will stick around).
- Go to any page of the site.
- Open FireBug by clicking the little insect at the bottom of your FireFox window:
Starting Firebug
- Then open Google Page Speed by clicking the ‘Page Speed’ tab at the top of the Firebug window.
- Click ‘Analyze Performance’.
- Make sure that ’Minify CSS‘, ’Minify javascript‘, ’Minify HTML‘, ’Optimize images‘ and ’Enable Compression‘ are all green:
Example of green results in Google Pagespeed
- If one of those items isn’t green, click it. You’ll get an expanded list of exactly what you can do to fix the problem. You can even download the optimized file by clicking the link for each item:
Minify instructions in Google Page Speed
If you replace your javascripts and CSS with minified versions, be sure to save a non-minified version, too. It’s no fun trying to edit a minified file, trust me.
- If the images, javascripts or style sheets are hosted on another server, like the tcr.tynt.com javascript in the example above, you probably cannot do anything. Don’t include it in your report or todo list. If the images, javascript files or style sheets are hosted on your server, though, you can fix it.
Enabling compression is more complicated. If you are a webmaster and know what to do, go for it. Otherwise, get in touch with your IT or webmaster team, and have them do it for you. It will yield instant performance improvements, so it’s worth the effort.
If you control the site, you can download the optimized image or minified code right from the list by clicking ’minified version‘ or the equivalent. Back up your old files, upload the minified version to the server and rename it, and you’ll see immediate results.
If you do not control the site, you’ll need to include these performance issues in your report. There’s no pre-written note I can give you here. Every case is different. But the best way to pass this information along is to state exactly which files you would like replaced, and attach the minified/compressed versions. Make sure the client/webmaster understands that these files are probably loaded for every single page on their site, so minifying or compressing them will save a lot of bandwidth.
That’s it
You’re done. Well, not done, but at least you’ve found and fixed any emergency items. This is strictly meatball surgery, meant to keep your patient alive. Remember – this is just the triage. After this, you’ll need to get down to business and some serious ongoing SEO.