Like a car owner who reads ‘Automobiles for Dummies’ and feels empowered and less of a victim, so does the website owner who takes it upon himself to learn some SEO basics and then with his own eyes, analyze his website.
It is in that spirit of self-empowerment that we begin part one of this multi-part series: DIY Seo Health Check-up.
The majority of our Check-up will be done in ‘source code view’ of your browser. Meaning you’ll have to go to your website on the internet and then in the ‘view’ options select ‘view source’ in the browser. When you do this you will see a window pop up with a whole lot of ‘matrix-looking’ coding. Fear not! We will be searching for specific words using the find feature in your browser (CTRL+F), so you don’t have to wade through the swamp of code.
Are Your Drop Down Menus Visible to Google?
A fatal mistake is for a website to have its navigation links obscured from or unreadable by Google. This error prevents Google from finding all the pages in your site and thus prevents said pages from getting indexed. Website builders do not do this intentionally; they just don’t have the benefit of also being trained in SEO best practices.
How do I check?
Quite simply, in your browser, on the home page, hover over one of your menu links and wait for the submenu to pop out. Once it does click on one of the submenu links. You will then be taken to that page. When the page loads go and copy the file name up in the URL bar. For instance: portfolio.htm, or about-us.php, whatever it may be.
What this does is gives us the url of one of your pages in your submenu. Now go back to the home page and then ‘view source’. A file will pop up, at which point you will press CTRL+F on your keyboard (to activate the find function) and then just paste in the URL that you copied on the previous page.
If the link you pasted in is findable to the search engines then the find function in your browser will be able to find the link. If the link is not findable to the search engines then the find function will indicate that the text you searched for was not present in the code. Remember you must be in ‘source code’ mode when you search.
Note
In order to make this test as accurate as possible, don’t choose any links that you know are in the submenus AND in the content section or other parts of the page. For instance if you had a link to your ‘about.htm’ page in the ‘welcome to our site text’ on your home page, and you also had that same link in your submenu it may be hard for you to differentiate which one you are finding when you ‘view source’ and search the link.
Next
Stay tuned for our next article on checking if your site has ‘H tags’. If you don’t know what those are then be sure you come back and find out!
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