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Search engine optimization is, fundamentally, a process. Understanding all of the challenges and opportunities facing your website (and tactical changes one can implement) is rooted in the all-powerful website review.

The importance of SEO site reviews
Consider building a house. If you wanted to create your dream home you’d need to know a little about the plot it would be built on, the availability and cost of materials, your mortgage and financing options, the most efficient construction schedule, how to negotiate a construction contract, etc. before you ever stepped into the world of building a home.

SEO follows a similar concept.

Beginning the process of optimizing a website involves understanding the state of affairs for that particular site. You need understand the “what” of a website before you can move onto defining the “will be.” We review sites across all the necessary factors to understand the big picture of why your site is performing the way it is, and how to best tackle your objectives moving forward.

So, what’s involved in a site review?
In short, quite a bit. Search engine optimization is also about optimizing your website for your visitors, and we include factors such as usability in our reviews as well. Following is a list of factors we look at when conducting a site review, and some tools which make reviewing individual factors possible.

Before You Start

• Implement each Search Engine’s brand of Webmaster Tools for feedback on site quality from all Search Engines.
  • Google Webmaster Tools – http:www.google.comwebmasters
  • Bing Webmaster Center – http:www.bing.comwebmaster
  • Yahoo Site Explorer – http:siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
• Have some kind of Analytics solution in place for historical data and research.
• Outline 3 to 5 competitors and the vertical market leader. Grab screenshots of their websites at their homepage, category, sub-category, product information page and sitemap page. These are for competitive reference.

Layout and Organization

• Does the site layout make sense for the industry? Is the content grouped meaningfully?
• Is the meta content descriptive and logical?
• How do competitors group and label their content?

Usability

• Is there a clear content hierarchy?
• Is the navigation clear and useful?

Accessibility

• Is there a Robots.txt Implementation?
• Review the site content without images or javascript. **Tool Tip** Google Webmaster Tools has a load of tools for code-level review.
• Is the content semantically accurate?
• Does the site render well without image and JS?

Conversion/Call to Action

• Is it clear what the goal of the website is?
• Is there more than one goal? What are they?
• What kinds of labels are conversion/call to actions using? Consider competition and best practices.

Your Site & Google
(Again, the Search Engine’s webmaster sites are full of this kind of information.)

• What kinds of content counts does a “site:” operator return? Does the homepage rank #1?
• Does the site rank #1 for its brand?
• Is Google caching all the content of a given page?

Duplicate Content

• Do urls resolve with both www and without? For example: http:www.yoursite.com and http:yousite.com
• Is duplicate content served on pages with a trailing slash (http:www.yoursite.com v.s. http:www.yoursite.com/)
• Is your site content being scraped or republished elsewhere?

URLs

• Is there a single URL per page? If not, does the site use a canonical tag on URL variations?
• Are the URLs short and keyword rich?
• Is the brand term in front of the keywords?
• Is the file structure optimal?
• Do the titles have the correct character count?

Title Tags

• Are title tags truly unique across homepage, category, sub-category and product/information pages?
• Are title tags descriptive and keyword-targeted?

Content Review

• Does the site have enough content? Consider the competition.
• Are the header tags optimal and semantically accurate?

Meta Tags

• Are they meaningful?
• Do the meta descriptions contain optimal keywords for the page targeting?
• Are there robot meta tags in place?

Redirects

• Is the site currently redirecting anything? Are ALL redirects 301s?
• What are the most powerful pages on the domain (site: command or SEOmoz Labs Top Pages tool) Are all these pages providing 200 or 301 http headers?

Internal Linking

• How many links are there off the homepage? Off the category pages?
• Are there too many links or too few?
• What is the ratio of links to text?
• Where are the opportunities to consolidate content and reduce total link quantity?
• Is the anchor text meaningful and keyword rich?
• Are they using nofollow on any internal links?

External Linking

• Where does the site link out to? **Bing’s linkfromdomain operator will list all URLs link to from a domain**
• Does the site link out with relevant anchor text?
• Does the site just link to homepages or does it actually link to deep content?
• Are there enough outbound links?
• Are they selling paid links?

Geo-location

• Where is the website IP located?
• Is there a local address listing on the website consistently?
• Is the website/location claimed on Google Local? Is the address consistent between the site and Google Local?
• Is the address in hcard format?
• Do the contact/location pages have relevant locational keywords in title/description/header?
• Does the site link out quality citation sources on the contact/location pages?

Semantic HTML & Images

• Does the site use complaint markup? Are they properly leveraging CSS?
• Do images have ALT text? Are the file paths optimal?
• Is the general semantic build of the site in good shape?

Whew! That’s a lot of stuff, and it’s critical to understand. Just what do you do this all this information? Well, in digging around on your website we’ll locate  a number of issues. Some sites have small issues to correct, others will have major things to repair. The point of all this is rooted in the fact SEO success is often predicated on hundreds of small things. The search engines take hundreds of factors into account when ranking websites, and often it’s the websites that check off all the little things that get where they want to be.

We’ll compile a list of specific, tactical recommendations that will address the issues we find, and once these issues are resolved, we’ll use this information to create documents outlining changes and tactics to employ to deep on-page optimization and off-page linkbuilding opportunities.

Alas, these are topics for another post! Until then – take this list and run with it. Feel free to chip in your additions in the comments.