Have you given your site one of these SEO scoring tests? Or has a sales person contacted you about your poor SEO score and wants to help you improve it. There are many of these “tests” that measure a number of different attributes about your website and most of them come up with some comparative score.
I think the test results can be a useful aid to a webmaster trying to improve his site; it also can be used as a scare tactic to mislead the site owner. I am all for using assessment tools to help guide improvement, but I am totally against relying on “scores” to determine how much you should be investing in SEO. Most of the times these scores are used by sales people trying to scare you into doing business with them.
Below are some common elements that I see for most scoring systems and my opinion on what impact they have on SEO. Some of these elements are important for a lot of reasons besides rankings, but my assessment is mainly from an SEO standpoint.
Site is slow to download: Important. Google has repeatedly stated that download speed of a website was an important factor in the visitor experience (also faster websites use less Google resources). I am recommending that webmasters pay attention to page download speed and use tools that Google has recommended (including Google Webmaster Tools) to monitor and manage this.
Title tags duplicate or poor relevance, or no title tag: Very Important, I have seen pages get ranking purely by having well constructed, and keyword rich title tags.
Description Meta tag not existing or duplicate: Important. The description Meta tag does not directly affect rankings; however this is what shows up under the title in the Search listings. Have a compelling description that contains keywords can increase the click through rate.
No alt text: Not very important: Search engines don’t seem to be paying much attention to alt tags, although I highly recommend using them on images that are linked as these appear to be treated the same way as anchor text in links.
Not using h1, h2, tags: Somewhat important. Lots of evidence around that seems to suggest that this is not as important as it use to be. Don’t get me wrong, I still use them and there are many search engine specialists that still insists that this is important.
Site does not seem to change content frequently: Very Important. Changing content whether it is by a blog or other means is important and will boost rankings.
Site has little content: Very Important. Search engines love content, the more the better.
Page rank: Somewhat Important. I think this is way over sold and I have a number of sites that have low page ranks that “dominate” their niche. Don’t get me wrong, a site with a page rank of seven is going be able to dominate a lot of niches, but I also see lots of low page rank sites on top of the search engine rankings. You need to understand who you are competing against before spending thousands of dollars per year to boost your page rank.
Inbound links: Important, but over sold. The standard assessment tools for inbound links (and page rank) don’t consider the competitiveness of the market niche, nor do they adequately assess the quality and relevance of the link. In some areas, just a few hundred quality links can make your site the big dog, in other niches you may need thousands. 20,000 low value links is a waste of money. Most of us aren’t competing against amazon.com.
No tweets found: Inconclusive. I think this is an easy way to measure social buzz, which does have an impact on rankings, but there are other social media avenues that can help. A recent study by a well known SEO research organization determined that “shares” on facebook had a much more significant impact on rankings than number of tweets. Again Social media is gaining importance, but just jumping in and tweeting isn’t going to do anything for your serps.
Poorly structured urls: Important. Sites that have urls with lots of symbols etc (that don’t make sense to the human viewer) are going to get clicked less than a site url that actually has a relevant keyword in it. I also believe that these pages will rank higher with everything else being equal.
Using tables instead of css: Somewhat important. There are too many advantages for using css to not use them, but it does not appear that using tables hampers your rankings the way it was thought several years ago.
Site not WC3 compliant: Not important. Getting your site wc3 compliant is a very good idea, but Google specifically stated that this has no bearing on rankings. If your site displays in Firefox, the search engine will be able to read the content.
Site does not have analytics: Not important. Having any kind of traffic tracking code on your site has no effect on rankings. However if people are measuring traffic and making adjustments to their site based on traffic patterns, they will have a better site.
Broken links: Important. A site with a lot of outbound and internal broken links I will result in a poor user experience, ergo – lower rankings.
In summary, to gain a top ranking, you have to beat a site that is competing in the same arena as you are. SEO scores tend to lump all sites together as if they were all competing for the same keyword. Spending thousands of dollars so you can compare well to amazon.com, if your business is underwater drilling is a waste of resources.
