Before explaining how I prepare a website for optimization and SEO positioning, I will talk about the online tools I use to analyze results before and after improvements:
Performance and SEO Analysis ▶ WOORANK
Even in its free version, Woorank reliably and intuitively provides essential information for analyzing the performance and SEO of our website.
By simply entering our URL, the tool will indicate, in just a few seconds, all the important data we need about our website traffic, social impact, content keywords, indexing status, usability, security, and web or mobile optimization, among others.
Although some users complain about certain instability and lack of reliability in the application, the truth is that, as a reference and guide for web analysis, it is the most complete (free) tool I have found.
Measuring Website Loading Speed ▶ PINGDOM / GOOGLE PAGE SPEED TOOLS
Pingdom is a free online tool that allows you to test a page’s load time, analyze it, and identify bottlenecks. It checks load time, page weight, page performance rating according to Google PageSpeed (another essential tool), and provides a list of performance values to apply precise solutions to improve our website’s performance. We can also use Google’s Page Speed Tools directly, which are equally useful although they provide less information.
See My Website As Google Sees It ▶ SEOBROWSER
SEO-Browser is a tool that allows you to see how search engine robots view your website. In its free version, we can see how Google actually reads our text, titles, and images, and in the premium version it also allows views from other search engines like Yahoo or Bing, and provides more detailed analysis.
It is a fundamental tool for analyzing our website’s SEO.
View Our Website on Different OS, Devices, and Browsers ▶ BROWSERSTACK
Browserstack is the must-have application to see how Internet Explorer wrecks our beautiful website, turning it into a complete disaster—especially on outdated operating systems.
Seriously though, never consider a website finished until you’ve run a full Browserstack test. Although we may be used to browsing with Firefox or Chrome and using the latest Mac OS, not everyone is that up to date. Think of your mother or your relatives from the countryside—they matter too.
The most dreaded part of being a web developer is facing the harsh reality of Explorer and its interpretation of our website. Probably, after running the Browserstack test, you’ll have to make a few adjustments and rewrite CSS to accommodate this picky browser that’s still used by a considerable portion of the population.
If you want to run a quick test just for Internet Explorer, you can also use Netrenderer netrenderer.com, which is faster than Browserstack and doesn’t require registration, but is very limited as it only provides a screenshot of the top portion of the website for different Explorer versions.
Website Traffic Analysis ▶ GOOGLE ANALYTICS
At this point, there’s no need to elaborate on Google Analytics. It’s simply an absolutely essential tool for SEO. Period.
Website SEO Analysis ▶ GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS
If Google Analytics is the mother of SEO, Google Webmaster Tools is the father. Both tools are essential for managing the SEO of our website, and the information they provide is 100% reliable, accurate, and complete regarding traffic and Google searches leading to our site.
You may also be interested in: robots.txt, .htaccess, GZIP compression, and sitemaps.xml
