Hungerford Web Design Blog

(OK, the astute amongst you will notice there are four tools here - I almost forgot the most important - the SEO text browser….)

Search engine optimisation is an ever-important part of web development and design. Developers nowadays simply must have an appreciation for SEO (whilst not having to be experts) to ensure that nothing we do negatively impacts the sites we develop.

This is a list and description of some of the best tools we use to help check our sites for standards compliance, SEO and syntax checking. It’s by no means exhaustive and I’m sure others will have more/better tools. If there is something you use which you would suggest to others, please add it in a comment.

Tools:

• Website Grader
  This tool has come on so much from when it was first launched. Just check out some of the checks and information provided by this report:

• SEOCentro’s Meta Tag Analyzer
  The Meta Tag Analyzer tool is useful for a number of reasons. Not only does it give you some pretty bespoke information on your keywords and descriptions but it also grades them according to recognised acceptable limits and is easily represented in a Red Amber Green font to highlight areas of concern as you can see in the first image below:
  As you can see in the next image, a report on the number of times your keywords are used is also presented. I admit, I have some work to do here to get my keywords to a suffucient quantity without saturating my pages.

  

• SEO Text Browser
  Now this is a neat little piece of kit. It’s accessed (or at least I access it) from www.whois.sc. On the right hand side, underneath the thumbnail and other info you will see the SEO text browser. This little applet of joy will a) give you an SEO score %age which seems to me to be pretty good and b) will offer advice on items to improve. I love it!! The other good thing about this application is that it shows you how your site may be displayed to text-browsing users, this is especcially important in the UK where it is illegal for business and government websites to not be accessible to disabled users (NB: this is true, although you wouldn’t have thought so based on the number of government websites which fail their own tests!)

  

• W3 Validator
  The W3 organisation determines the standards by which web pages should be defined. To help with this, they provide a validator that will check the syntax and structure of your website. Assuming the work you have done is to standard, they will confirm this to your site visitors through an image (if you wish)

  
  
  There is a (probably) accurate school of thought that a standards compliant website will have better ranks/seo/featuring due to the fact that your page is written in such a way that search engine bots and other robots can digest your page easily as it is in a format they expect. Additionally, less than able users should be able to browse your site more effectively, particularly when using screen readers and other similar technolog

Related sites to view:

• Google Ranking Factors
• Your SEO Plan
• Matt Cutts

If you have any tools, articles or resources which you have found useful, please let me know, I really get off on the gadget side of SEO so would love to give any other resources a chance.

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