How to give your Website a Health Check

Making sure your website is healthy by giving it a health check is one of the most important things you can do. If just a few elements of your site are not working the way they should do,

then it can bring your entire site down in both performance and search engine rankings. Here we will look at a few simple things you can check in order to make sure that your website has a clean bill of health.

The Foundation

The foundation of your site is build on the content. This basically means the keywords you use in order to optimise your site. For example, if your keywords are ‘web design for orthodontists’ then you need to make sure that all of your pages are optimised correctly. While you’re doing that, make sure the HTML for your site is correct and that all of the menus and links are working correctly as well. If people find themselves being led into dead ends, then they will not visit your site in the future.

Check Your Content

When it comes to your content, ensuring you have originality is the most important thing. If you have plagiarised content, then this can bring your search engine ranking way down in a hurry. Also try and update the headings you use in your content to try and keep them fresh and new when people visit your site. Double check that the ads you have on your web pages do not outnumber the amount of content, and ensure that you have made it easy for people to share your content through social media.

Fine Tuning

Now it is time to do a little maintenance on your site. Have a look around and see if you have any links that lead to error messages on your site. When you find them, make sure they are fixed immediately. Also try and find broken links to any source materials you have used as well, as this can really hurt your search engine ranking. Tools like Screaming Frog are a great way of diagnosing these problems so then you can focus on finding a cure for them.

Use What You Discover

In order to complete some of these tests, you will need to use analytic and diagnostic tools like Screaming Frog in order to get the best results. In the process, you will probably get a lot of information about how your site is operating in certain areas. There is no reason why any of this information should go to waste. Try and use it to make your website even better than it was before. See if you can improve your SEO strategy. If we use ‘web design for orthodontists’ as the example again, you could try and improve the amount of long-tail keywords you have. Or you could even use the information you get to make your site perform just that little bit better, even if you find you have a clean bill of health.