How to check a web sites offsite SEO health

There are many reasons why you would want to check the offsite SEO health of a web site; you may be sizing up the competition, considering buying a link or you may just want to see how your site is doing. One quick way to check the factors that affect sites offsite SEO health is to download and run SEO for Firefox. This tool, although very useful does slow Firefox down. So if you want to check a sites offsite SEO health manually here is how you do it.

1) Check the two major directories
A place in the two major web site directories will have an effect on a sites SEO health, so, to check for a sites presence in the Yahoo directory visit http://dir.yahoo.com/ and type the web sites address into the search box. To check for the web sites presence in the Open Directory Project do the same thing but instead of going to Yahoo visit http://www.dmoz.org/ and type the websites name in the search box.

2) Check the websites back links
The number and quality of back links will have an effect on the sites SEO health. The best way to check the back links is to go to www.yahoo.com and type into the search box without the link: followed by the name of your site for example link:www.bbc.co.uk . This will bring up a list of all the back links that Yahoo has for this site.

3) Check the Alexa Ranking for the site
Alexa ranking is an estimate of how much traffic the website receives. To check the Alexa rank of a site go to http://www.alexa.com and type the website address into the bar at the top, this will display the sites Alexa ranking.

4) Check the websites Page Rank
You can do this by downloading and installing the Google toolbar and enabling page rank. To do this, simply go to Google, type in Google tool bar, follow the link and install the toolbar making sure you select the option to enable Page Rank. Once you have installed the tool bar, simply visit the site and the Page Rank will be displayed in the bar at the top. If you don’t want to install Google tool bar (perhaps because of the privacy implications) - oh yes they know what you are looking at. Then you can go to http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker and type your URL in.

This post has covered the basic ways to check a sites offsite SEO health. There are, of course, other factors but these four should give you the indication of a sites offsite SEO health that you need. Any comments questions or suggestions are always welcome.