Whether you are analyzing a competitor, putting together a proposal for a prospect or giving a current client a report, knowing what to look at and what to ignore is vital. Here are the steps I go through. You will notice a lot of the steps are not Pure SEO steps, they are more webmaster steps, as SEO is easy. Seriously, it is.

Once you figure out the keywords which convert in PPC you optimize for them, however, before you get to that step, you have to make sure the site is ready. By gathering this type of information, your prospect will think you are a genius (which of course you are) and you can compile it in about 30-40 minutes, when it will seem like hours were spent.

Lets use a site I did as a review at StomperNet in 2007 as an example. They arent a client or a member, nor am I an affiliate of theirs, so it should be a clean domain to use: patioshoppers.com.

Here we go

Step One: Go to the site. Sounds simple enough, but many SEOs actually skip this until later. Dont make this mistake. If the site design is so bad that no one would ever buy, doing an SEO analysis is pointless. If the prospect is unwilling to fix their design, you dont want their SEO business. Period.

Commentary: Their site design while not great, isnt bad. For an eCommerce site it is functional enough in my opinion.

Step Two: Check for non-www protection. While you may be sick of hearing me rant about this, it can do WONDERS for your site in terms of internal duplicate content. More info.

Commentary: The example site does NOT have the rewrite in place, thus is suffering from internal duplicate content.

Step Three: Do the site command to see the total number of pages in Googles index for the domain.

Commentary: Here is an example of the search to do in Google.

site:patioshoppers.com

Returns 1,350 pages. However, if I scroll to the bottom (I have my default set to 100 results per page and you should too) I see that there are only four pages of results. Clicking on 4 it shows 378 pages. Why? Google states there is duplicate content. The amount? 972 pages (over 70% of the indexed pages). Thats not good.

Possible fixes:

1) Put in place the non-www page protection so Google only spiders one version of the website.
2) Edit the Titles and Descriptions which duplicate or near-duplicate so Google sees the page as unique.
3) Edit the body content so it is up-to-date.

Step Four: Check the domain in DomainTools.com. Here I am given a lot of solid information:

a) Title & Description (verify they are compelling and relevant)
b) Click on the SEO Text Browser for detailed info
c) Check the Keyword Meta Tag for relevancy
d) When was the domain registered and are there red flags?
e) Is the domain on a dedicated IP address or shared?

Commentary:

a) Title and Description are okay from an SEO stand point, but if you read them out loud, they really sound bad. I would suggest making them stronger in the compelling area. They are too SEOd) in my view with three pipe symbols and four keyphrases. The description doesnt have any real punch to it. My rewrite would be:

Title: Specialty Patio Furniture Shop with FREE Shipping – Always
Description: Get a 110% Best Price Guarantee so when you buy your patio furniture from us you know you are getting the best price. You also get access to Best Buy Guides so you know what to look for in your furniture so your investment lasts more than just one season. And if you call, you wont get someone who doesnt know patio furniture. They can answer ALL of your questions to ensure you make the right choice. Call Toll-Free 1.800.940.6123.

While you may argue that the Title and Description arent SEOd, I would say, So what? you can use incoming anchor text to get the top rankings, but making the Title and Description compelling means that you can get more click throughs than your competitors even though they outrank you.

b) Many of the large graphics on the site are missing ALT text. Not all the images have height and width dimensions which can cause problems in load time. Many internal links have query strings in the URLs which can cause indexing problems with Google. This is a classic case of the need of a rewrite solution.

c) The Keyword Meta tag is out of focus and contains keyword phrases such as umbrellas which are not solely focused in the patio furniture market. I would suggest reducing the amount of phrases to 10 and only include phrases which actually appear on the page.

d) While it states the domain was registered in 05, checking the Registrar History we see there was one drop and the domain was actually registered first back in 02. You can check Archive.org to see what the old site looked like.

e) The domain is on a dedicated IP address.

Step Five: Check YSlow. More Info.

a) Check Server Type and Version in bottom of browser
b) Size of Page
c) HTTP load requests

Commentary:

a) Their server is Apache, which will focus on doing mod_rewrite for their URL strings, but the version is 1.3, an outdated version. Regardless of what their host says, there are known vulnerabilities which are corrected in version 2 of Apache. The upgrade can occur without causing too much disruption (usually takes about two hours with at least one server restart).

b) 789K is HUGE for a page. It really needs some help. Nearly a half meg in images alone. This site could use having their images optimized. Just doing that alone could reduce the load by 35%.

c) 48 HTTP requests isnt excessive, but it is a problem. Most of the problem lies in the 13 external JavaScript files. One that should be punted is the Alexa verification at the bottom of the page. Seriously, no one cares.

Step Six: Verify a Google Webmaster Tools account

Look for the verification meta tag. If the prospect does not have a Google Webmaster Tools account, explain the importance of it.

Step Seven: Verify Targeted Keyword Phrases.

Dont let your client or prospect tell you which keywords they are targeted, let their website tell you. Use the Ultimate SEO Tool and with Step One ensure no targeted phrase has a double digit keyword density. When you go to Step Two you will see all the keyphrases which appear on the page two or more times and where they currently rank in Google.

Commentary:

Overall the density looks good as the highest density is just 6%. However, the rankings for the keyword phrases targeted on-page are quite poor. Only two phrases, umbrellas outdoor cushions and patio umbrellas outdoor has a top five ranking

Step Eight: Link Saturation
You can run the SEO Visibility Checker and export the results to Excel, then combine the spreadsheets to give you a solid look at the unique domains.

Commentary: Combined both Yahoo! and Google backlinks totaled 848 links. However, when you take out the duplicates, which Yahoo! loves to do, you end up with 635 links, and a lot of those are search queries which wont count. Overall, the link strength looks poor.

Step Nine: Cache Rate in Google
You want to make sure the site is getting cached on a regular basis. I use the Crawl Test over at SEOMoz (paid service) to test the top 50 pages to see which are having difficulty getting crawled on a regular basis.

cache:Patio Umbrellas | Outdoor Cushions | Patio Heaters

Commentary: Our example site has about a dozen or so pages which need help getting indexed more often.

Possible Fixes:

1) Ensure page with old cache is listed in the Google XML Sitemap.
2) Verify links pointing to the page with an old cache date appear on either the home page or a main category page. Often, links drop off, thus Google cant crawl the page on its own.
3) Get 5-10 really good links pointing to the page from pages that have fresh cache dates.

Step Ten: Run a quick analysis in SpyFu on the domain.

You can export the Organic Rankings, Paid Rankings and Competitors from here. This will allow you to understand the space better and give the prospect/client a good idea of what they are up against.

Bonus Step: Check for Spam Links – especially in a Blog.

With malware infections becoming more and more common online these days, sites and blogs are being compromised without the webmaster even knowing it. Typically, the Spammer will place dozens, hundreds, or even thousands and links hidden in the code to their Viagra, Casino, Porn, etc. sites.

How can you check? Its pretty simple.

Just do a site command in Google. For example:

site:patioshoppers.com casino

This will check the domain for any reference to the word casino. If you get a few hundred pages returned and you are NOT in the casino business, chances are VERY good youve been hacked.

Other phrases you should check would be:

porn
viagra
cialis

Just four and it will take you less then two minutes to run the check. If you find evidence of a hack attempt and this site is a prospects site, guess what? Youve probably just landed their business.

For future searches, I would highly recommend setting up a Google Alert.

So, from the above, this is the summary I would give the prospect so it is easy for them to understand and comprehend.