Site Analysis by the optimizer is vital as it would provide the basic understanding about the functionality and nature of the website. The following are looked up on a website before optimization:
- Site Design
- Templates
- Navigation
- Colors
- Backgrounds [images, scripts, coding]
- Fonts [headers, paragraphs, font size]
- Broken Links
- Images [content image ratio, size, embedded text visibility, alt tags]
- Meta Tags
- Browser & System compatibility
- Site Speed
- Current Search Engine rankings
- 404 Errors
- HTML Validation
Website analysis is required before presenting a proposal as this can determine the depth of work and time frame involved. The factors listed above do have considerable impact on the rankings.
For example, a site with poor HTML coding would not be able to let search engine spiders crawl the pages successfully. This results in poor understanding of the site by the crawler and yields lower rankings. If the website is already well known with the search engines and most of the pages have already been cached by the crawlers, then the site would be looked into for broken links, 404 errors or technical issues.