How Healthy Is Your Website?

One of the first symptoms we like to diagnose are finding what areas the website is under achieving results in and determine the weaknesses of the website. After the diagnosis, we are able to develop a fix to assist and strengthen the website to perform better. Much like their human counterparts, websites can range from being very ill to very healthy. Sometimes a small change is all that is needed, while sometimes a drastic lifestyle change is in order.

When diagnosing problems with websites, there are many parts that need to be considered. If your website is not functioning to its full ability, you will not get the performance and therefore the results you are looking for. As with any profession, we combine the expertise of other specialists. In this case, we often use Google to assist with diagnosis by viewing your website and seeing what shows up.

We break this step down by analyzing only the text part of the cache instead of the full. By doing this, it allows us to find deep seeded problems that otherwise may not be detected. If you suspect your website may be suffering, here are some symptoms you should recognize:
• There appears to be a list of words that are not linked that show up in a drop-down menu.
• Some of the content on your page is missing, or the page is completely blank.
• Links that should be appearing are not showing up.
• Paragraphs with keywords are popping up that you don’t normally see when viewing your site.

If your site is missing content on a page, it could be because Google is unable to index it. If the page is completely blank, it could be part of a graphic or embedded. In order to remedy this, you need to convert all the words that may be part of a graphic or embedded into the form of HTML.

If your site has missing links, you most likely could be using an unfriendly search engine that requires the use of Flash or Java. To fix this, you need to recode it or use a non-script tag in order to allow search engines to use the links.

If your site has words showing up in a drop-down menu that shouldn’t be there, they would not be able to be indexed through a search engine, you should change the information in that menu to a friendlier format for search engines.

If you are seeing paragraphs full of keywords that you normally cannot see, you probably have been the victim of someone placing them on your website to fool the search engines. Search for any hidden code that may be the cause and get rid of it.

This tool is a great way to begin the diagnosis of your website.