How to Read an SEO Report

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Monitoring your website can seem like a full-time job, that is why many SEO specialists, webmasters, and business owners use automated tools and report generators. zeetank.com offers several helpful SEO tools, including a general analysis report.

The report is simple to run, just enter the website URL into the box, select the factors to be checked and hit “REVIEW”.

Now, once the report has been generated, it is full of information and for many business owners, this information can be tough to understand. Luckily, the report offers helpful tips throughout that give summaries of what each section means and helpful tips on how to fix any issues.

Below is a summary of the report with all factors included along with a quick overview of each item.

Scoring

At the top of the page, there is a scoring system displayed. This scoring system gives a quick glance at the overall performance of the site. The SEO score is displayed first, letting you know how well your site is optimized. The next items include how many factors were tested that passed, how many have warnings associated with them, and how many failed. If any tests were performed with unresolved results, they will be displayed in the list box. 

Common SEO Issues

The first portion of the report includes the most common SEO issues, such as Meta tags, H1 and H2 tags, keyword usage, sitemap, code to text ratio, and Google analytics. This is where most problems are most commonly found, so pay attention to the report closely and note any instructions given on how to rectify issues.

Website Title and Description

If your website title or description is too short or too long, it will be displayed here. Most search engines will truncate titles up to 70 characters and descriptions up to 160 characters in length.

Common Keywords and Keywords Usage

This section shows you the most common keywords found on your site and the number of times they are used.

The keywords usage section lets you know if you have forgotten to include keywords in your meta-tags. The search engines use meta-tags to properly identify the topic of your page.

H1 and H2 Headings

Using H1 and H2 tags throughout your site not only helps it look nicer for visitors, but it also helps optimize it for SEO. The section displays not only if the headings are used, but where they can be found on your page.

Robots.txt Test

Search engines use programs called spiders to search your site and bring back information for indexing purposes. If there are parts of your page that you do not want to search, a robot.txt file placed in the root folder of your website manages that for better optimization.

Sitemap Test

Every website needs a sitemap.xml file in order to rank well with the search engines. The .xml file allows the search engine to crawl through the site's pages and locate important data for each page. The search engines use this file to check how often a site is updated and how important it is compared to other URLs on the site.

Favicon Test and Validator

This section displays whether or not the site is properly using a favicon. Favicons are small icons that appear in the browser's URL navigation bar. They are used for branding a site, making it easy for users to locate you in a large pool of bookmarked sites.

Page Objects

The total number of page objects is listed here, such as HTML pages, CSS files, images, scripts, and videos. The number of page objects can cause the page to load slowly, so refer to the tips in this section for increasing your overall load speed. 

Code to Text Ratio

If your page is loaded with code but offers little text, you will fail this test. Search engines do not use the code-to-text ratio as a ranking factor but it does impact user experience and load speed.

URL SEO Friendly Test

This checks the website URL to ensure all links from inside are SEO-friendly.

Google Analytics

Website monitoring is important, so your site should be using a Google Analytics tracking code.

Underscore in Links Test

If there are any links that use underscores instead of the recommended hyphens they will be displayed in this section.

Image ALT Test

This section analyzes the image tags on your site and ensures they have the required ‘alt’ attribute.

Inline CSS Test

If your page is using Inline CSS properties it can increase the text to code ratio if they are not moved to an external folder.

Media Print Test

This section will offer information and tips on how to set up a media print CSS rule for custom printability.

Google Preview

This section displays how your website looks on the search engine results page. This gives you a quick glance to determine if your website title or description is too long. 

Keywords Cloud

This offers a quick view of the keywords used on your site and how frequently they appear. The words are in alphabetical order and the keywords that appear more often are in larger fonts.

Deprecated HTML Tags

This section displays if the site is using old, outdated HTML tags that have lost browser support.

Speed Optimizations

How fast your page loads is important to the search engines, but even more so to the users who visit your site. If your page is too slow when loading visitors are more likely to back out of the page, creating a high bounce rate that can reflect poorly on your search engine ranking.

HTML Page Size Test

This shows how large the HTML code is on your page, not including images, external CSS files, or javascript. The lower this number the faster the page loads.

HTML Compression/GZIP Test

The HTML compression helps to decrease the page size and increase load speed.

Other Speed Tests

In addition to the above tests, the overall speed and performance of your website is tested in the following areas:

• Page Cache
• Flash
• Nestled Tables
• Image Expire Tags
• Doctype
• Frameset
• Site Loading Speed
• JS Minification
• CSS Minification

Server and Security

There are several items tested for the server and security of the website. It checks the stability of the server, the security of the server, and even tests for malware.

• URL Canonicalization
• Directory Browsing
• Libwww-perl Access
• Server Signature
• Plaintext Emails
• IP Canonicalization
• Safe Browsing

Mobility Usability

Mobile-friendly websites are no longer just a recommendation for good SEO, they are a requirement. This section offers a media query responsive test to check the functionality of your site on mobile devices and gives a snapshot of what your mobile site looks like to the consumer.

If you have not set up your website to function in mobile environments the issues will be displayed in this section.

Social Media

Social media has become a powerful marketing tool and it is a huge part of your business's overall success. It is important to implement a social media campaign into your SEO efforts if you want positive results.

This section shows you if your website is connected to any social media platform, and if not, how to resolve the issue. It checks all social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Social network plugins need to be placed on your pages, such as a Facebook Like button or a Twitter button in order to pass this test.

In this section, you will also be given a quick glance at your social media activity. You can check how many Facebook likes you have, how many shares, and how many comments. Twitter offers the number of tweets that have been posted and Google+ displays how many total PlusOnes you have.