Audit Your Landing Pages

Alexa Site Audit, the Landing Page Auditor. The Landing Page Auditor is a simple, yet powerful, interactive tool designed to help you giving your landing pages the best SEO boost you can.

You start by choosing a page you want to audit. It can be any page on your site, but you want to concentrate on those few pages you really want to drive organic search traffic to. The idea is do everything you can to help search engines learn what these pages are about, and to emphasize that these are the pages to show when people search for your keywords.

When you click on the Landing Page Auditor, the first thing you see are tables containing an overview and a histogram of all the anchor text on your site for links to the page you are analyzing. If you look at the screen shot to the right, which was taken from a report run on my family blog, you can see that my site has 3064 links to my home page. You can also see how the numbers of links break down by anchor text phrase.

Looking at your anchor text is a great place to start. First, make sure that your text is descriptive and that you have avoided phrases like "click here" or "more". For my blog, over 1000 pages have "Home" as anchor text. These "Home" links, while fine for visitors to my blog, are of little value to a search engine. Also, while you are looking over your anchor text, make sure each phrase describes the page you are auditing. With the exception of "Home" and a few navigation links, the anchor text to my blog's home page seems to be reasonable so I'll move on.

Once you are comfortable with your anchor text, the next step is to enter the keyword or keyword phrase you want to audit. Landing pages should be fairly specific, so you should optimize each page for three to five keywords. There are a small number of crucial places you want your keyword to appear, and when you enter your keyword a new column will appear telling you which of these crucial your keyword appears in. In the example to the right, you can see that my keyword phrase is missing in all but the page text. I guess I have some work to do.

By default we show you the results of the page crawled as part of the site audit, but you can also check your live site by pressing the "Update From Live Site" button. Since the anchor text data is built by looking at your entire site, the only way to update that data is to run another report.

When a keyword has been entered, the anchor text column on the left also changes slightly. The data is the same, but it is split between links whose anchor text contain the keyword and links whose anchor text does not. In the example, less than 1/3 of the links on my site to my home page have anchor text containing my keyword phrase. I am fine with that since I want my anchor text to be optimized for other keywords as well, and I want to avoid keyword stuffing.

Once I am happy with my page and have decided on the changes I want to make to my anchor text, I can move on to my the next keyword or my next landing page. That's it. As I said, the Landing Page Auditor is a simple yet powerful tool to help you optimize your website for organic search.

See Also: