SEO Checkup DIY

The original title of this post was Free SEO Checkup for Your Site in which our story’s hero, me, would provide you with a detailed SEO report about your site, and then follow up with ways to improve your site’s SEO health. I’ve been marketing this service for a while, and have had some pretty happy customers whose rankings have improved after learning where their sites were lacking.

In the interest of transparency, I will now reveal the tool I use to do this research.

But, before I do, let me explain a little about SEO. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s a process, something that you have to continually feed and water, and if Google, in its infinite wisdom, decides to hang a sharp left (as they’ve done in the past), they’re darn well entitled to do just that. I’ve always explained to clients that, “I wouldn’t believe anyone that claimed to know SEO unless they came up first on a search for ‘SEO’.”

Google Chrome is my browser of choice. It, like Firefox before, has a plugin architecture where developers can create add-ons to enhance the core product. One of the most useful extensions I’ve found for Chrome, quite by accident, is called SEOquake. SEOquake is available for Firefox, Opera and Safari as well. You can learn more and install the extension from their site, http://www.seoquake.com/.

Go to the Google Chrome Web store and do a search for SEOquake. It will appear at the top. Install the extension. Then, open up a new browser tab and navigate to your website. Right-click anywhere on the background, and under SEOquake, you’ll find several choices. Select Page Info, the first choice. You’ll see data about your site’s rank, a diagnosis page to see where you can improve your site’s SEO health, linking information and even a comparison against your competitors.

Now that you have the tool at your immediate disposal, you can keep careful tabs on your site’s SEO health and improve your search engine rankings.