A Website Checker from Down Under

This video review is part of our ongoing series covering website SEO checkers, tools that will check the search engine optimization of a page or pages on your website to see how well they measure up against SEO best practices.

In previous video reviews, I’ve covered Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer and SEO Centro’s SEO Analyzer.  This time around we’ll take a look at an Australian SEO Checker that’s been around since 2012, SEOptimer.

[Note: Check out the other SEO Checker reviews we’ve posted on our blog or on our YouTube channel]

And if you, like me, would prefer to skim text, a verbatim transcript appears below the video.

Do you use any of these tools? Leave us a comment. Do you want us to review your favorite tool? Leave us a comment about that too.

And if you’d like to download our SEO Audit Essentials checklist (which you’ll see in the video), you can get a copy by visiting this page.

Transcript of SEOptimer Video Review

With a sleek, modern interface, SEOptimerclaims to have the “grade to rule all” grades, and that’s a pretty ambitious claim for a free tool that does an SEO check on your website. Now, I don’t really know this company and I don’t even know whether to call it S-E-O optimer or S-E optimer, but any case, we’ll answer the question about the grade to rule all grades in just a minute.

Hi. I’m Ross Barefoot with Horizon Web Marketing and the Horizon Web Marketing Academy and we’ve been going through some of the free online tools that are available that will help you to do an SEO check on your website. So, the next one that we’re going to take a look at is SEOptimer and we’re going to just take a quick walk through it and see if it does what it purports to do, which is to give you that grade that rules all grades.

So, when you arrive at the homepage for Seoptimer, you’ll see that it’s a very modern website. It looks like a fair amount of budget has gone into developing it and if you poke around in their website a bit, you’ll see that this tool’s been up and online since 2012, according to the site. The company is in Australia and they have a number of free tools available on their website and they also do SEO consulting services. I’m not really familiar with them as a provider. I don’t really make a recommendation or a criticism, but in my other tab here, we’re going to take a look at a project that I’ve plugged in to see what it looks like when we do an SEO check on that site.

In this case, it’s a site we’ve been using with other similar checkers. It’s called Artisans of Colorado. Right at the top it gives me a letter grade, which is fairly typical for these types of tools. It tells me that I’m ranking a C+, that my page could be better, which of course, is something you could say just about any website that’s out there. Let’s just scroll down a little bit and you can see how they’ve broken this down into a number of different categories. SEO, usability, performance, social and security. Kind of ironic social and security are next to each other, at least for the U.S. market. Now, we’ll drop down, we’ll see the overall grade and then we’ll see that they examined a number of the basic things that should be given attention to. In the header of the website, they’ll take a look at the title tag. They’ll give me a printout of what it contains. Recommendation on its length. Meta description tag. It’ll give me a notification if there’s no title tag or no meta description tag.

Drop down a little bit farther here, and it’ll tell me whether there’s a good distribution of text in the header tags for the website. Now, one of the things that I did pick out is it’ll tell me that I have multiple H1 tags. It won’t necessarily give any sort of warning with regard to those, and one of the things that I’d like to see here that it doesn’t have would be, a better inventory right at the front side of these header tags. But, it does have it buried, just a little bit deeper, so in this interface, if I click where it says show more details, there I will see the inventory of contents of those various header tags.

Definitely nice the way they have that. You just have to know to click on the blue button to show more details. The keyword, consistency, will show me some distribution of words and which ones are most common on the page. That’s a good thing. It would be nice if they had two and three keyword phrases as well, but the single keywords are better than nothing, definitely. It’ll also give me a warning on the low content on this page and certainly this page does have minimal, textual content, so that’s a valid warning.

On the image alt attributes, it’s a similar situation to the header tags. You’ve got to click to show them. The one thing here that I’d prefer to see is I’d like to see what the alt attribute says. In this case it’ll tell me which image on the page, this one right here, does not have any text in the alt attribute, but it won’t really give me anything in terms of a recommendation. It also has a section that tells me about the number of backlinks. It gives me a nice overview, here, of Moz’s domain authority, which is one of the industry’s standard numbers, measuring how high quality the backlink structure is. Dropdown here for the link structure. It’ll tell me, and I like this, that it gives me all the various links on the page, along with whether they’re flagged as follow or no-follow. Now, if you’re a beginner with SEO, a lot of this stuff that I’ve been rolling through here, you’re probably going to need to do some research and know how to analyze some of theses elements.

This tool’s a little bit lean on recommendations for absolute beginners, but it does, if you’ve got something else that’s giving you some guidance, it’ll show you some reportage here of what’s going on in your site, that is very useful. I’m going to dropdown here. It’ll show the presence of a robots.txt, XML site map. It takes a look as to whether the site is going to render correctly on mobile, versus tablet, versus desktop. It’ll check a few of the various elements that could be a problem if crawlers need to access your site, which of course, they do. So, it’s good that it checks those things. On the speed check, it’s actually a pretty good test of the page speed info, because it doesn’t just give you a overall low time. It’ll show you the response time of the server. It’ll give you an all-page content loaded and then all-page scripts complete. Now, here again, if you’re not familiar with some of these terms, it’s going to be of limited usefulness to you, but if you know a little bit more, it does give you some useful information and then it will give you a little bit more in terms of the various components of your page that are being used. For example, the number of JavaScript files that are going on.

And if you’re a programmer, you can use this as kind of a heads up, if you’ve got over usage of some of these elements. Dropdown a little bit here and it will take a look at your social profiles. In the case of this site, we don’t have anything going on, so it’s giving me a red flag on all of these various elements. Then it does have a good check of security. It’ll tell me whether I’m using secure protocol, the SSL right here. It’ll tell me whether HTTPS has been set up correctly and it’ll also tell me whether I’m being reported as having malware embedded on my site. I think that’s very useful. Most of the checkers don’t give us this type of feedback, so I think in that case, it was superior to some of the other tools we’ve taken a look at.

Then, it will give me an overview of some of the various technological components used to build the page. Some of the various, sort of, techy details that are related to it. Then it’ll give me a number of recommendations. In this case, they’re good recommendations. Again, they’re pretty minimal, in the sense that they’ll tell me to execute a link building strategy, but they don’t really tell me how to do that. And to be fair, it’s really hard to teach someone how to, for example, do a link building strategy on a tool that’s a free one-page checker. So, a number of these things here are very good to take a look at. Not going to try to explain each of them. What I am going to do is, I’m going to see how does this stack up, and this is kind of a new thing I’m doing on some of these checkers, in that I’m going to go to our SEO audit checklist.

Now, this checklist is a free resource, that we make available to anyone, and as a matter of fact, you can download a copy of this for yourself, and what I’ve started doing is taking a look at our checklist, which has 91 different items on it, and seeing is SEO, and I put here, this is an incorrect statement here, by the way. I need to stop myself right now. See where it says SEO Optimer up here? I kept calling it, in my mind, SEO Optimer, and then, if you go to Seoptimer, you’ll actually go to a site that downloads malware, so please, let me do a verbal correction here that this site, as a matter of fact, I think I’ll do it even though I’ve got the video running, I’m going to change this right here, right now. It’s SE Optimer.com, so make sure you get it right. Don’t make the mistake that I did.

On our 91 checklist, basically, I’ve got two different components that this audit checklist is broken into. The whole thing and then also the technical side of things. So, for technical SEO factors, and most of these checkers are focused on the technical factors, I have 30 different points that we check when we do an SEO audit on the site and they hit nine of these where SE Optimer can actually help you, and you’ll see some of them here. For example, the presence of an XML sitemap. Whether the site speed is acceptable or not. Is the site using HTTPS? Is the domain clean of malicious code, and again, most tools won’t do that. Dangerously invalid HTML, broken links. Is the site mobile friendly? And these things over here, you’ll see them flagged, yes, and yes means that SE Optimer, if you’re using it, could actually help you to clear those items if you’re doing your own audit checklist.

You can see, however, that it’s not going to really hit everything that a professional SEO audit would hit. I can just scroll down here and kind of give you a general overview of all the items that you still need to pay attention to, even if you’re running it. So, although I really like a lot of aspects of this tool and I like the fact that it’s modern, well maintained and so forth, I probably would not agree that it will give you the grade to rule all grades. On our comprehensive SEO audit checklist, it hit 16 out of 91 points. On our technical checklist, it hit 9 out of 30 points. So, good tool, but you will have to do more if you’re going to do a thorough SEO audit on your site. By the way, if you want a professional to do an SEO audit for you, definitely come to Horizon Web Marketing. That’s the type of thing we really love digging our teeth into. And, if you want to learn how to do one for yourself, take a look at the Horizon Web Marketing Academy, that’s the training arm of Horizon Web Marketing, where we teach business people and web masters and basically anyone who has an interest, how they can master a lot of these issues with regard to search engine optimization and perform them on their own or with their own team.

Again, my name is Ross Barefoot with Horizon Web Marketing and Horizon Web Marketing Academy. I appreciate you taking the time and subscribe, down at the bottom, so that you can get the next review, that we do have a website grader and you can stay on top of the best tools that are out there at the lowest cost. Thanks again for watching.

Ross Barefoot

Ross Barefoot got his start in small business managing an importing company in the bicycle industry.  While there, he tried his hand at programming to find more effective ways to track, market and sell his company’s range of bicycle parts. He loved the web marketing side of things so much he became a professional web developer in 2001, starting a website design business in Western Colorado. He took his first SEO certification course from the Search Engine Academy in 2002, followed it up with another in 2004, and decided to jump full time into SEO training and consulting in 2011, becoming a Master Certified Instructor with the Search Engine Academy, where he continues to serve on the Board of Directors. Today, Ross is CTO, trainer and chief SEO strategist at Horizon Web Marketing (www.horizonwebmarketing.com), a full-service digital marketing agency based in Las Vegas.